Civil War, war madness and photography. Alex Garland’s film review

Arriving at the cinema from April 18th, a journey into the heart of darkness of an America torn apart by conflict. The painful and ferocious snapshot of a near future, between authoritarian presidents, violent soldiers and cynical and desperate photojournalists

Bye Bye Land of Freedom. The land of freedom and opportunity has been transfigured into a desert of pain and violence. The United States of Civil War (in Italian cinemas starting from Thursday 18 April”, are a country divided in two. A nation in collapse. And perhaps only an English director like Alex Garland could effectively narrate America’s cruel decline on the big screen. After the Apocalypse from bedroom seen in Men (for those who write a very powerful and very underrated horror film) the British filmmaker raises the bar and shows us a collective catastrophe. After all, what is more uncivilized than a civil war? Net of the epiphany of references to recent Stars and Stripes history (the base camp of the secessionists is located in Charlottesville, where in 2017 during a demonstration neo-fascists, white nationalists, neo-Nazis, members of the Ku Klux Klan killed a 32-year-old woman years, Heather Heyer, injuring 35 other people), the feature film concerns the entire globe. And once again, unfortunately, George Santayana’s phrase engraved in thirty languages ​​on the monument at the entrance to the Dachau concentration camp becomes very relevant. “He who does not remember the past is condemned to repeat it.” It is no coincidence that the character of the photojournalist played by Kristen Dunst is called Lee Miller, like the first woman who entered and photographed the concentration camp opened on 22 March 1933 on the initiative of Heinrich Himmler .

Between Horizons of Glory, The Warriors of the Night And Gangs of New York

Heroes don’t live here. Like then Paths of Glory by Kubrick, There is no romantic idea of ​​conflict in Civil War, The famous shot Raising the Flag on Iwo Jimdated 1945 has been transfigured into a faded and wrinkled photocopy. In the not too distant future. Western forces from Texas and California and the Alliance people of Florida revolted against Washington. The president of the United States (his dictatorial and presumptuous ways are not too distant from Donad Trump) makes appeals for the secessionists to surrender. But they are just words blown away by the winds of war. If as the claim of Gangs of New York d Martin Scorsese “America was born in the streets, according to Garland’s film it will always die in the streets” So the film turns into a road movie. Like the army protagonist of Xenophon’s Anabasis, the war photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst) together with the young aspiring photographer Jesse (Cailee Spaeny), the journalist Joel (Wagner Moura) and the elderly reporter Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), they leave for the White House with the hope of getting an interview with the head of government. However, their journey will be more tortuous and dangerous than that of the Warriors to return to Coney Island in The Warriors of the Nightand Walter Hill.

What kind of American are you?

Military men, stationed as snipers, who kill only to avoid being killed and have no idea of ​​the enemies they are shooting at. The crazy soldier (played by a killer Jesse Plemons) who asks “What kind of American are you? ) and if you give the wrong answer you end up horizontal in a mass grave. These two epochal scenes are enough to understand that in Civil Warthere is no meaning to the war being fought. The reasons for the conflict themselves are not explained. Garland is interested in showing the madness and horror of war. The same horror prophesied by Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now, they are “empty men who lean on each other’s straw heads. Except that unlike Eliot’s poem, in this film the world ends not with a whimper, but with a crash. The director chose to use blank bullets. He wanted the actors to hear the frightening noise of the shots.

A macabre dance to the tune of America The Beautiful

The clashes in Civil Warthey are brutal, realistic and never complacent, Terror runs along the edge of abandoned car parks, the blood does not spurt like a fountain, but flows on the asphalt when a corpse has been lying there for a long time. I imagine during the pandemic and scripted before the events of the Capitol City and the assault on the Capitol, the film is the frightening x-ray of a fractured world. Chaos, brutality, disintegration and division shake in this macabre dance marked by the notes of Sweet Little Sister by Skid Row edi Say No Goby De La Soul. But the most disturbing music is America The Beautiful. That patriotic hymn only whistled is the prelude to the triumph of death. And Garland’s film forces us to look into the eyes of what could be our end, our last look if we don’t decide to change and go back to communicating.And.