The Art of War

Apocalypse is brewing in “Civil War,” “Arcadian,” and “Dawn of the Dead.”

Editor’s note: This piece contains significant spoilers for “Civil War.”

It’s annoying when dramas with political backdrops refuse to establish the ideologies of their characters, no matter how germane they might be to the narratives. This strategy of vagueness is intended to enable everyone to enjoy the production because, delicate hothouse flowers that we all are, we might not like it if we are asked to relate to someone with a different perspective than our own. Our alienation means potential loss of box office or ratings, and what’s a more immediate political unifier than money anyway?

Director Alex Garland’s “Civil War” is playing a similar game.

His new film is a movie about a future American civil war that tells you as little as possible about said civil war. No mention of culture wars, which is what many people, especially those who spend their lives in the online rage machine, continue to assume will bring us to the brink. No mention of political parties. No mention of military strategies. Factions engaging in the conflict are named, but aren’t described or outlined in detail. There’s pointedly no mention of any of the issues splitting us apart in real life: voting rights, abortion, systemic racism, religion, gender, economic inequality, climate change, foreign policy and legacies of past wars, monopolies and technological overreach.

Certain phrases in the above graph will hit different people on different sides of the aisle in different ways. That’s what Garland is hoping to avoid, though there are subtle cues for those who want something more explicit. He’s courting his audience out of the side of his mouth. He wants the cache of making a movie about a civil war in these polarized times, without getting his hands too dirty. Critics have taken the bait and called “Civil War” ideologically neutral. It’s not. It’s just a message movie without the courage of its convictions. Or maybe Garland knows that preaching in a prestige movie is not notable, and he’s going for something theoretically hipper for its ambiguity. The studio releasing the film, A24, loves movies that mistake skeletal, under-imagination for complexity. But Garland’s breadcrumbs can be found if you’re looking.

 

The President of the United States here is played by Nick Offerman, who’s commanding for the two or three minutes that we see him, and he’s coded as a Trump-type taken to the next level of fascist overreach. He’s said to have dissolved the F.B.I., which evokes Trump’s clashes with Comey, Mueller, Pence, etc. This Offerman President, I don’t think we even learn his name, is also hostile to journalists. Charlottesville is name-dropped, and every bad guy we meet is visually and behaviorally coded as a racist redneck.

The siege on the White House at the film’s climax suggests revenge against Trump’s unforgivable role in the January 6 incident, and ends with the President’s death, which Garland actively celebrates. In our “spoiler”-phobe culture, meant to encourage critics to function as P.R. agents rather than fulfill their job, few have mentioned the film’s ending. Yes, Garland celebrates a raid on the White House and the killing of the President of the United States as a happy ending. There’s a freeze-frame on soldiers smiling over dead Offerman, while an inspirational alt-rock song plays over the credits.

Garland is playing Quentin Tarantino games, except Tarantino has the courage of his volatility. It is Garland’s feigning of sensitivity while satiating mercenary instincts that leaves a bad taste. “Civil War,” after about an hour of virtual dead air, reveals itself to be a fantasy of killing a President who is coded just enough as Trump to give Garland’s audience their jollies while preserving for the filmmaker plausible deniability. This callous, pat ending is remarkable for existing in a mainstream movie. It’s even more remarkable for being so ineffective. It’s inflammatory only if you’re paying attention and attempting to take the movie seriously. But Garland’s wishy-washy tactics largely work in terms of putting the movie over to a mass audience as a choose-your-own-adventure survival narrative.

It’s the blandness that’s galling. If you want to stick it to Trump then go for it and let Offerman go wild. Admit to what your movie is selling. Or let anyone do anything. I linger on the climax because it’s the only interesting element of “Civil War.” Otherwise, it suggests a zombie movie without the zombies, with characters who are said to be photojournalists taking a road trip across the dilapidated heartland to interview Offerman before he’s sacked, though, ultimately, and this isn’t presented ironically, they have no interest in what he has to say. Along the way, they navigate rednecks and roadblocks and talk about nothing. Garland’s script is a bonanza of banalities and inspirational clichés that could fit comfortably into a Roland Emmerich disaster movie.

Kirsten Dunst is a celebrated war photographer who doesn’t like the President, but what else? It’s not an exaggeration to say that no character here ever discloses an opinion about the second American civil war. Self-conscious, Garland includes a scene designed to address those who will criticize him for his disinterest in his own subject: When a soldier is asked about who he’s shooting at, he says it doesn’t matter as long as they’re shooting. So, this is about the animal amorality of war, then? But Garland is too deliberate a filmmaker to dramatize war’s chaos.

When war breaks out here, Garland resorts to sequences shot in slow-mo and over-scored, so as to get them over with for the next round of journalists not talking about anything. The terrifying, anything-goes aura of war, the sort of thing that Sam Fuller and Oliver Stone, both veterans, have each pulled off, is nowhere to be seen. Again, there are plenty of breadcrumbs. Certain images recall Vietnam; others recall photos from soldiers’ occupations in parts of the Middle East. These bits, along with references to The New York Times and the climactic fantasy camp at the White House, are sops to critics. Garland appears to make movies less for audiences than as think pieces, and, given the esteem in which his films are held, the ploy has paid off handsomely.

 

“Arcadian,” this week’s Nic Cage movie, is another film about the end of modern society, but it’s not pretending to be anything more than a passable monster movie. It’s a rip-off of “A Quiet Place,” with Cage as a stoic mentor to two teenage boys who are beginning to grow into a rebellious streak. Michael Nilon’s script is a wisp of a thing, and so the potential coming-of-age standoff between Cage and his boys doesn’t go anywhere. It’s all about the monsters which come out at night, after Cage and the gang spend their day fixing things and taking in the tranquility of the Irish country. The monsters are impressively weird, bringing to mind spindly, spidery coyotes that open up and turn into John Carpenter’s “The Thing” at close range. You can’t quite get a handle on them, and that’s to the good. The director here, Benjamin Brewer, has potential.

“Arcadian” slips into rote mediocrity after a solid first act, but the film is nearly worth seeing for one sequence. A boy pretends to be asleep while an alien arm stretches and stretches through an unlocked peephole towards his face. This scene has a shivery, fairy tale power, capitalizing on the fact that we haven’t seen the monsters yet. We’re encouraged to wonder what in the hell they could possibly be, which is of course the central pleasure of a watching a monster movie. Brewer appreciates the power of silence. We see that outstretched arm and could hear a pin drop in anticipation.

Like most movies and TV shows concerned with the fall of the modern world, “Civil War” and “Arcadian” are driven by wish-fulfillment. With all the noise gone, we can stop reading nonsense online and rooting for our political football team and get to learning how to do real things, like chopping wood and fixing generators. You have to look harder for this wish-fulfillment in “Civil War,” but it is there, as the journalists are sanded entirely down to their need to document what’s in front of them. No rent, no other bills, just dodging stereotypical rednecks and waxing pseudo-profound on the powers of journalism. Zombie narratives often play on this desire, too. Sure, there are monsters, but otherwise we can run around in the woods and form “Survivor” factions and do what we want. These are fantasies, then, of us finding true usefulness outside of serving as anonymous cogs for unsatisfying wages. As is often the case with most movies connected to zombies and the potential apocalypse, George A. Romero got there first.

 

It’s unfair to use Romero’s “Dawn of the Dead” against ‘Civil War.” It’s not an evenly matched fight, as Romero’s film is a masterpiece. But life isn’t fair. “Dawn of the Dead” turns 45 this year and is playing at Movieland this weekend. Romero does more in the first 10 minutes of this astonishing movie than Garland manages across the entire running time of “Civil War.” A TV station collapses into chaos while broadcasting a debate about the rise of the undead that is rooted in old notions of right-left politics. The S.W.A.T. team raids a housing project, with one team member going on a racist rampage while the undead rise and gobble up the law enforcement.

In 10 minutes, Romero offers two sequences that interlock to form an essay on how media and law enforcement impose a status quo that the undead are demolishing. That status quo is tempting for those with the means to live above considerations of race and poverty and caste supremacy, and so the film’s protagonists flee to an abandoned mall and live in a temporary utopia of unchecked privilege. They are working-class people who have won the lottery via the annihilation of society as it was.

This is what a progressive genre film looks like: daring, nuanced, and punk rock in its casual comfort with anarchy. For most filmmakers, zombies are monsters. For Romero, they are a series of nesting metaphors. They are the repressed, waiting for revenge—every horror aficionado can decode that one. They are also foils out of the Three Stooges, terrifying ghouls, and lost souls. They are even, in the film’s unforgettable final sequence, agents of an ironic restoration—capitalist hunger made pure and pain-free in the totality of its mindlessness. Romero isn’t smug like Garland, he empathizes with the comfort of this mindlessness, and those who can’t probably already belong to the elite.

In the opening minutes of “Dawn of the Dead,” Romero indicts everything that’s wrong with America. The surprise of the film is how he comes to celebrate what’s right with America as well. As the heroes of the film unite to barricade the mall against the zombies, they bond in their shared bravery and sense of invention, social barriers fade … but never crumble. Romero is too tough for such sentimentality, but he’s too much of a humanist to deny it altogether. The film is gnarly, funny, poetic, free-associational, and ultimately irresolvable. Art, in other words, that shows movies like “Civil War” up as glorified bumper stickers.

“Civil War” and “Arcadia” are in theaters everywhere. “Dawn of the Dead” is playing this weekend at Movieland.

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