#antebellumfilmschool: Ep. 14 - Civil War: Alex Garland’s Apolitical Swan Song (SPOILERS)
The riots, I always shot with the intent to capture humanity. And I could say, as a person who watched this movie in the movie theater, what I really, really admired was the absence of explaining to me what I'm seeing. Instead of looking at it through the lens of here. Let's explain what this war is, which is what actual propaganda is. It decided to take on the perspective of here. You take away what you need to take away from this movie
Todd Heimbecker
@noarms · 0:08
Hello. Thanks for the great story. Take care. Have a great day. Again, thanks for the great story. I enjoyed it. Take care
It's called vigilance by Robert Jackson Bennett. I'll put a link to the Amazon book here. And essentially it's a version of the United States that has surrendered entirely to gun violence. And to the extent that they've created a reality tv show, you don't know exactly when if you're going to be on the show. And the survivors end up winning a cash prize. The key being the survivors
Michael Knight
@MK1981 · 3:21
It might be a civil war on top of a world war, and then where does it leave us? Right? Like, you know, what does survival look like in a situation like that? So I think it's really good for people to start thinking about this, and maybe it'll actually help with people's voting patterns and, you know, give people, because I think we are stuck in this binary of good guys and bad guys
Now, with this movie, it does something that I think a lot of films has had a hard time doing. And it's treating us with the, the presentation of war as something that this is not something you want. War has gone beyond being just an action movie. War is a fantasy. It's something that we indulge in. We have, you know, the second Amendment here in the United States. We have mass shootings that are regular. And the pushback isn't legislation
And when you think about where films are now, you know, filmmaking used to be that thing where if I show you a rated r movie from the 1970s and the 1980s all the way up to the nineties, they had a certain type of tangibility, and they wore their. Their rating like a badge of honor
And this is why I kept having to remind myself that this was a documentary, is because the gunfire is so loud, it's so dangerous, it's so consequential. It doesn't feel as if I'm trying to watch something that's an action movie. And this is. I'm gonna tie this into your last statement that you made in. Yes
Swell Team
@Swell · 0:15
And it's done so within this absentminded fantasy, because the south still can't let go the fact that the confederacy lost. And so a modern civil war has always been something that people, you know, they fantasize about having again, because to me, it's a do over. It's the equivalent of when you watch Rambo two
Michael Knight
@MK1981 · 4:11
I mean, the social media, the phones, the way that we live our lives, it's amazing when I think about it, because, again, so you would think that we have the Internet, we have all this information at our fingertips, and instead of the mass, the vast majority of the things that we actually search and think about, like not how to improve our homes, not how to garden, not how to do these things that would, you know, improve our well being, it's more just kind of mind numbing distractions, like social media that we scroll through day in and day out, like we're always looking for some type of escapism, and it shows up in the media we consume, it shows up in our entertainment
javon johnson
@motoblanco · 4:18
What we in the third world have to put up with as far as the politics and how things, you know, how things go down. I didn't say anything. I walked away. But what he said stuck with me, you know, and I mean, I mean, I kind of noticed it before I even spoke to that guy. I mean, I noticed it, what was going on
These are the individuals, and this is how it's affecting individual lives. Right. And that is really powerful. And I don't think. I don't think that. I mean, I have no idea. You don't see it that often. So it makes me wonder whether a lot of people have the ability to write stories like this, you know, that can sort of create this. The imagery in my mind is like adjusting the focus on the camera, right?
I understand that was part of her journey as a journalist and given some of the images she had to sort of tackle with within the first ten minutes of the film, I understand why her personality was so terrible, but it was very taxing for me to watch. And ultimately I had to leave, which I don't love doing. I don't love leaving movies halfway through a movie. But my wife looked at me and I was very uncomfortable
I personally believe every filmmaker should have that one film that 100% divides its audience because it really shows. It shows a bit of a sensibility that as a director, he can make something that's so polarizing that you either love it or you hate it. But the conversation is what's going to drive the perspectives. It really shows the quality of work, because I think we all want to, like, make a citizen Kane
But, you know, my review was able to kind of sway them into possibly seeing it sometime in the future. Plums discussion about a book that, you know, this discussion kind of reminded her of that. And I've ordered that book, actually, and I can't wait to read it because it was very fascinating, especially after seeing a movie like Civil War
So it's funny that you. Because I've already put spoils in there. I don't want to continue to spoil every single scene in the movie for everyone. You brought up the. You use the metaphor of a camera and trying to refocus, you know, the perspective in order to get a better understanding of it. And that's a big part of this film. And there's a. There's two sequences in the movie that really stood out to me
And so I really just. I really appreciate his voice and his levity, because I think it's something that some of my favorite directors, even Martin Scorsese and all of them who I love and I worship at the altar of that. That mindset of cinema. They don't even tackle certain things in their older age the way Alex does. So 100% agree with you. I just had to come back because I think Garland is a. He's a gem in the modern era
