“weak.”

with q&a with directors alex garland and ray mendoza and actor will poulter

a show of force made by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing. went into this hoping to be as pleasantly lukewarm as i ended up being towards civil war (which already felt like hoping for the very best tbh), but this very much did negative things for me. even at his worst, garland has proven himself to be quite adept at taking the almost stupidly/comically blunt, loose, and/or vague ideas at the center of his scripts and complementing, if not compensating for them with a staunch and structuralist formal approach, and this still isn’t much of an exception on that front. this is mostly visually and especially sonically strong work, and the cast is uniformly great, too—joseph quinn probably the mvp of the film just for how much his vocal chords go through, like jesus christ—but this whole thing just left me cold. i understand what this is going for, and moment to moment there are so many details, mainly of the rigid procedures and codes of the military, that have a lot of potential, but this really just bored me and quickly left a sour taste in my mouth. hearing mendoza talk in the q&a about how some of the actors were performing no more than 10 feet away from the real men that were there (and many of whom are apparently still currently serving in the military) is already one thing, but him saying he wanted to portray The Courage Of The United States Military and “do these men right” in almost the same breath as talking about trying to do it from an “”Apolitical”” perspective is all too telling. i haven’t seen september 5 (i went bowling instead), but i went into this with many of the same questions that were levied at that film in mind: why tell this story, why tell it like this, why tell it now? and of all movies, i came out of this thinking a little bit about the brutalist—how so much of the discourse around that film was about what it was trying to say about zionism in the end, whether or not it was doing enough to concretely one side or the other, and how this is so incredibly nothing in its attempt at “”””objectively””” portraying very much subjective perspectives that it couldn’t even really leave me with the ability to entertain a notion like that. if you want a modern war movie, go watch orders, and let’s hope that the script for 28 years later is good enough to make me forget about this!

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