By The Big Magazine Staff
We saw A24's current release, Civil War directed by Alex Garland gets an overall rating of 3 stars 🌟🌟🌟 , here's why!
On Thursday we saw an early showing of Alex Garland’s provocative dystopian thriller “Civil War” at IPIC theater in Westwood. As a fan of half of Garland’s films Ex Machina (2015) and Annihilation (2018) we expected lots of color, VFX and emphasis on AI or tech. Instead there was excessive brutal violence and a lack of storyline and character development in general.
Alongside Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Nick Offerman make up the star-studded cast.
In Civil War’s first trailer, a news broadcast announces that 19 states have seceded and uprisings are occurring across the nation. Lee, a veteran war photographer, and her team attempt to document it all on video.
Four journalists are at the center of it all with little focus on anything going on in the world beyond the journalists next destination. The journalists are traversing the United States starting with a chaotic dystopian environment in New York City between the police forces, military, and vigilante civilians.
Kirsten Dunst stars as a photo journalist who traverses a divided United States in a dystopian future in the U.S. “where a team of military-embedded journalists races against time to reach Washington, D.C., before rebel factions descend upon the White House,” the synopsis reads.
Kirsten Dunst plays Lee, a photojournalist who works for Reuters alongside a reporter named Joel (Wagner Moura) is traveling to Washington D.C. in hopes of interviewing the president (Nick Offerman) before he surrenders to the military forces of something called the WA, or Western Alliance. Sammy (veteran character actor Stephen McKinley Henderson), an older black journalist who writes for a competitor outlet mentioned as “what’s left of the New York Times,” is an old soul that serves as a “father figure / guide” during the track to the White House.
The junior member of the group is, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny, the title character of "Priscilla"), who idolizes Dunst’s character “Lee.” Jessie learns the hard truth’s about becoming a war photographer while joining the group on their way to Washington, D.C. Along the way many of the film's shooting and sniper scenes were a giant bummer and the fire VFX also felt like a lack a budget.
Why the Civil War started was never really explained which is Garland’s style of leaving the narrative open to interpretation. If the reason for the uprising was explained in the end, we wouldn’t know because we left the theater early, Civil War was that cheesy!
Thus far the film is a box office hit with $25.7 million in its debut weekend even though it cost $55 million to make. It’s the first A24 movie to lead the charts in North America, setting an opening weekend record for the New York-based specialty studio.
Civil War will eventually be available to stream Max, but the release date is still TBD.
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