Email I received... 
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| A24's "Civil War": Hype or Hypothesis? Production company A24 released their much-anticipated movie “Civil War” in select theaters last night. It opens nationwide today. I attended a showing last night and will pass along my reflections, which contain no spoilers. The movie “Civil War” focuses on a small team of photojournalists navigating through the disruption of a civil war. They’re racing to D.C. to interview the sitting president before the “Western Forces” – the secessionist armies of California and Texas – invade to topple the U.S. Government. The plot is strained from the very beginning, and likely for good reason. Back in February, much of the sentiment surrounding the movie’s trailer centered on “predictive programming.” The term describes efforts by “the powers that be” to shape public opinion or modify behavior by injecting concepts into pop culture and the American zeitgeist. (We call that psychological operations.) So is it a PSYOP? Some have accused the studio A24 of producing the “Civil War” movie to psychologically prepare Americans to consider or even accept a violent conflict in a tense election year. But I didn’t get the sense that “Civil War” is “predictive programming”. The movie is largely apolitical. There’s no reference to political parties or ideology. In short, we don’t even know why the civil war is being fought, and that’s certainly by design. Further, the “Western Forces” consist of California and Texas, which are strange bedfellows. And none of the other regions are apparently involved in the war. My takeaway is that “Civil War” is a lot like most other Hollywood roller coaster movies with bad plots that are hyped for commercial success. This movie could have been extremely political. It could have been released on January 6th. The plot could have included an army drawn from Texas to southern Virginia invading Washington D.C. It could have been about scary fascists fighting for a Trump-like politician and democracy-loving good guys who prevail over evil at the very end. But it was none of those things. It’s a politically uninteresting movie that features some brutal realities of war, including armed violence and graphic shootouts, torture and lots of people being killed (some of them executed). And if there are any political messages, it’s only that war is ugly and brutal and that civil war is something to be avoided. The small team of photojournalists are mostly at the mercy of their environment. They get caught up in tense situations. The combat scenes are chaotic. F-35s and Apache helicopters flash across the big screen. There are explosions everywhere. And veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan are likely to laugh at some of the unrealistic, over-the-top combat scenes. The movie doesn’t offend anyone’s political sensibilities. It’s just another daft Hollywood thriller aiming for mass commercial appeal to make the studios lots of money – which it should because the film, if nothing else, was entertaining. |
