A chilling civil war

A chilling civil war
Descriptive text here

We are in the near future. The United States is devastated by a civil war. Ellie, an experienced photo reporter (Kirsten Dunst) decides, with her colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), to embark on a journey to reach Washington. They want to be the first to obtain an interview with the president cornered in his white fortress. Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), an old journalist, and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a novice photographer, join the team. Their journey through war zones will be harsh, trying and sometimes even surreal.

“Civil War” is written and directed by Briton Alex Garland, whose first feature film as a director, “Ex Machina”, was far from leaving us indifferent. Here he delivers his most ambitious and accomplished work. It may also be his last, the 53-year-old filmmaker having recently confirmed that he no longer has the desire to find himself behind a camera for a long time. It is also the most generously endowed production — nearly $50 million in budget — of all the feature films financed by the independent company A24. What you see on the screen seems twice as expensive.

To deal with what, since the arrival in 2016 of a certain Trump to power, no longer seems totally unthinkable, Alex Garland has chosen the camp of realism, of plausibility. Without being devoid of very spectacular action sequences, his film is a thousand miles from Manichean entertainment with invincible heroes, supervillains and clichés galore. It plunges the viewer into the heart of a terribly trying realistic conflict. We don’t really know how things escalated, or what tensions triggered the madness. We can guess them. Nothing is asserted. Ideological traps are avoided.

We just know that the current president describes the rebel states as “secessionist” and that he tends to often allude to God and the “founding fathers”. It’s up to the spectator to make his own cinema and to weave links to existing situations or that could have existed.

Garland focuses more on a character study. Her road movie is seen through the eyes of professionals who, by function, report, but do not comment. The tension peaks during a chilling scene where the group finds itself under threat from a heavily armed “soldier” (Jesse Plemons), perfectly aware of his absolute power.

If he never falls into the rut of the demonstrative, Alex Garland nevertheless has the elegance of not leaving the viewer in the lurch. He begins, he develops and, above all, concludes his story. It would have been too easy to abandon his world with an unresolved sequence. The finale, on the contrary, is formidable in its effectiveness.

Virtuoso, chilling, sometimes irritating, in the good sense of the word, “Civil War” is the film that has had the most impact on us since the start of the year.

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