This is why I am not going to pay to see this. It seems like too much “stylish distancing” to make a generalized facile point in this day and age.
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Plemons made a decent “good guy” in Fargo Season 2. Someone who just got caught up in deadly crap he can’t control.
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I’ve not seen it, so can’t really speak to that, but I’ll take your word for it. 
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… the one who told Kirsten Dunst not to stab their hostage too much or the ransomers wouldn’t want the hostage back 
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For all the “Seattle went Maoist” thing, my question would be: who is telling you that?
Who, in the movie, is making the statement, and to whom, about the Far-left Maoist Cultural Marxist unAmerican traitors and urban thugs occupying the North West?
Is it the fascists saying that? Because, you know, fascists lie. And I could easily see that being part of the point: that you don’t actually know jack about what’s happening in the NW, because the people who are telling you what is going on are liars who will lie about everything.
I say this, of course, without having seen the movie. It’s just an alternative interpretation of a secondhand datum.
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A New movie about war journalist, isnt It?
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=I haven’t seen it=
If the point is that war is a horrific, wasteful morass of death, destruction, and human suffering regardless of where, when, or why, then I could see why it might be a good time to remind people of that.
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I fully support your comment, however I find it difficult to believe a movie can do this when we have Ukraine and the utter shitfest that is Israel wiping a piece of ground off of the map, and dancing around the technicalities of genocide like they are a 10 year old learning logic.
If the real life horror isn’t doing it - then our journalists have failed, if a movie is capable of doing what the images from real war can not - I… I just have no words.
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Maybe the idea is that Americans still have trouble conceiving a full-blown war happening here because there hasn’t been a war on American soil in living memory. Even in WWII war was something that happened “over there.”
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=shrug= Fiction has always had ways of connecting the dots in ways that reality couldn’t.
But yeah, journalism has failed us. Along with everything else beholden to capitalism.
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We saw it this weekend. Yes, a bit surprising since my wife is still recovering from her gunshot wound so I did worry about the violence (it as her choice). The violence was very realistic and intense but not gratuitous. It’s a very grim and intense story in all the ways mentioned above and executed incredibly well. The ambiguity of the politics does serve the story well, however, I felt I was able to project my political POV into it but I’m not sure if that was meant intentional or universal.
I mean, Ron Swanson played the President. If that’s not some weird nod, it was a weird cast.
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agreed.
i sometimes wonder if the the alien, zombie, apocalypse, insurrection, … movies exist to help people feel better about our nation’s part in the actual conflicts happening world wide… like oh, it could happen here, so the fact it’s actually happening elsewhere is a-ok
i think i was the only person in the theater laughing out loud at the trailer… i assumed it would be a straight to dvd bomb. live and learn i guess. ( apparently, the transformers movies made money, and they seemed to be about the same level of gritty seriousness. *sigh* )
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What can I say, he has a type. I think @anon61221983 nailed it earlier:
I remember watching him in Breaking Bad - he came across as just a kind of “aw shucks I’m doing criminal stuff but I’m harmless — just trying to learn the ropes” kind of guy, then nonchalantly murders a child in cold blood much to the shock of Walt and Jesse. His additional back story in El Camino is somehow even more awful.
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Many of the reviews I’ve seen say that the movie isn’t ‘Political’, which I take to mean ‘Partisan’, but this isn’t really the case. Hitler, Mussolini and Ceausescu are name-checked in relation to the fictional resident of the White House, so the movie does nail it’s colours to the mast.
I’m not sure it would be possible to explain the current turmoil in the 'States succinctly in a movie. Where would you start? Reagan? Nixon? To my mind, the current turmoil is driven by misinformation, disinformation and outright lies which for the most part go unchallenged, if not actually promulgated by the media.
This is a movie about journalism, and the importance of journalism in a democratic state. It’s explicitly stated in the movie more than once.
The movie is neither objective nor immoral.
It is set a lightly fictionalised, future United States and everyone is losing their minds over this (how Texas and California could agree about anything enough to form an alliance about anything seems to be the most common objection). Is it too fictionalised, or not fictionalised enough?
The whole movie is seen from the perspective of a group of journalists in a car and apart from a vague orientation at the start of the movie, what we learn about this world is from exposition while in the car, and what we encounter outside during the road trip. This lack of external information adds tension to the film and is probably a fairly accurate depiction of driving around in an active warzone.
I don’t remember it being shaky. It’s mostly a road movie so a lot of the time is spent driving in a car with (I think) three intense, close-up action scenes.
'Zactly!
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exactly.
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After seeing people talking about the movie in prepper and right wing wackadoodle subs I assumed it was another let’s take back the country from the left movies.
The peppers are using it as a see, this is why I need all that ammunition story. They think a civil war is coming and they’ll need to kill their neighbors, soldiers, and police. What a way to go about life.
I’m still not going to crowded theaters so I’ll wait for streaming and check it out, maybe.
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Optimism is the opium of mankind! A healthy spirit stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!
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This is very trivial and bordering on the silly about a bit of cinematic fiction, but the creators of the film published a map (which is likely on-line somewhere), and accompanying the map are explanations of the divisions. From that some reviewers have concluded that the polarization in the nation went even more extreme and we read, for example from a new york times review (link):
This month A24, the powerhouse indie production company behind “Civil War,” released a map of the film’s fictional divisions on social media, under the hokey caption “Pledge your allegiance.” It showed an America split among the Loyalist States, stretching from the East Coast through the center of the country; the southern Florida Alliance; the secessionist Western Forces of California and Texas; and the New People’s Army of the northwest, which sounds vaguely Maoist.
…(vide supra [shrug] meme)
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