Alex Garland Has Gone from Thoughtful Questions to Banal Conclusions
Alex Garland Has Gone from Thoughtful Questions to Banal Conclusions
Rather than challenge his audience, the director now rests on simplistic observations.
When writer Alex Garland moved into the director’s chair with his 2014 sci-fi film Ex Machina, it seemed an exciting fit for the writer behind 28 Days Later and the adaptation of Never Let Me Go. Ex Machina offered no easy answers in its depiction of artificial intelligence with questions of what defines someone’s humanity. He then followed that up with the sci-fi horror adaptation Annihilation, a film that’s so comfortable being strange that its climax is a mirror-match dance-off.
Garland’s last two efforts—2022’s Men and this week’s Civil War—show a director who can still create aggressive, memorable images with actors giving memorable performances, and yet the ideas undergirding these movies are woefully simplistic and obvious. In Men, Jessie Buckley plays Harper, a grieving widow who goes to an English country house to mentally recuperate, only to find a place where all the men look the same (because they’re all played by Rory Kinnear) and represent different forms of misogyny. Everything Men is going to tell you is captured in the first twenty minutes or so as we see Harper wrestling with how responsible she should feel for her husband’s suicide when the men depicted in this movie both hate women and expect them to be objects of comfort and support. It’s not that Garland is wrong in his observation; he simply has nothing to add, and that’s the same problem with Civil War.
For those thinking that Civil War may have something to say about America in 2024, you’ll be pretty disappointed. Civil War is consciously and strenuously apolitical. When people saw in the marketing that the film’s secessionist “Western Forces” were comprised of California and Texas, they joked at the prospect of what would make one of our bluest states and one of our reddest states team up. But Garland puts them together so that you won’t consider any political specifics; instead, the core and only major concept of Civil War emerges, like Men, within the first twenty minutes: What if the United States looked like a modern war zone? From there, it’s really just a look at the lives of war correspondents (two photographers played Kristen Dunst and Cailee Spaeny, and two writers played by Wagner Moura and Stephen McKinley Henderson) with some sprinkling of notions of what would draw people to such a profession, if the act of looking can change behavior, and what it means to bear witness.
That’s the totality of the movie. Garland knows how to craft an image, especially with the talented cinematographer Rob Hardy (who also shot the director’s other features). He also can put together a great cast, and it’s terrific watching one of our best actors in Dunst deliver another great performance alongside a rising star like Spaeny, who clearly has an exciting career ahead of her. But all of that is meaningless because Civil War does everything it sets out to do before the first act is even over.
On the broadest level possible, I supposed it’s slightly admirable that Garland wants to try and give American audiences an idea of what war would look like on their turf in the present day. For those who may secretly long for a second civil war in the U.S. to act out their political bloodlust, we’re not going to have forces lining up on two sides in an open field while wearing different-colored uniforms. It will be difficult to tell friend from foe, there will be vast societal repercussions ranging from refugee crises to loss of infrastructure, and there’s the overall cruelty that war entails. If you really want to kill your fellow Americans en masse, Civil War provides a credible picture of what that would look like.
But again, most viewers will grasp that before the end of the first act, and there will still be about 70 minutes to go. Outside of that depiction, it seems the story Garland wants to tell is about war correspondence. And yet it feels like he’s somewhat cheapening that story by taking a real profession and setting it in a fictional conflict. The sad truth is that if Garland wanted to tell a story about a real war correspondents, he could, but it’s harder to get a studio’s backing unless you have a hook like “What if modern-day America was at war with itself?” I know this because in 2018 we got the film A Private War starring Oscar-nominee Rosamund Pike as war journalist Marie Colvin. The movie received positive reviews and only could get $18.8 million box office in its entire run—off a $3.9 million budget. By comparison, Civil War has a budget of $50 million and tracking expects it to pull in $18 million in its first weekend alone. Making the film about a modern civil war in America is as much a financial consideration as it is a narrative one, if not more so.
But a story like this draws strengths from its specifics, and even as a story about war correspondents, it doesn’t seem like Garland has much to say about the obvious importance of such dangerous work and how it affects those who conduct it. Maybe shooting film is as pointless as shooting guns, but I don’t think a guy who tells stories for a living thinks that journalism is as meaningless as war. It’s nice that he notes the texture and complications of such work, but ultimately these journalists are the story’s heroes. They’re the ones whose safety we’re concerned for, and so ultimately our empathy rests with them even if the film questions how much impact their work can have (we only see the story from their point of view; we’re never shown what impact, if any, their reporting has, although we’re told that large sections of the U.S. choose to simply ignore the war akin to how we ignore other war zones today).
That ignorance may try to serve as biting critique, but it’s toothless when the stakes of this civil war have no specificity. We’re told that the President (Nick Offerman) is in this third term, the war has been going for 14 months, and that the Western Forces are on the brink of taking the White House. But the stakes of such a conflict or what even ignited the war are left unsaid. Perhaps Garland wagered that getting bogged down in the political angle would cause people to miss the cost of the larger war where politics come secondary to killing the other guy before he kills you. But if that’s all we can boil this down to, then why does this need to be a 109-minute movie? What’s complicating the narrative here if it’s as straightforward as Garland wants to make it?
Like Men, Civil War feels well-intentioned. You’re not going to go wrong saying “sexism is bad” or “war is bad.” But the high concepts underwhelm these obvious and simple points. There’s constant straining in Civil War where it feels like Garland wants to shock the audience with how a modern civil war in America would look, with a rocket hitting the Lincoln Memorial or refugees filling a local stadium. But there’s a bit of scolding there too, as if our empathy can only extend to our countrymen and not when we see these images in other countries, as if the war in Ukraine doesn’t continue to rate in our largest news outlets or if people aren’t risking their lives to try and help refugees in Gaza. There’s an underlying assumption that we’re so inured to war that the only way to shock us out of it is to show it on our soil, and I find that patronizing and condescending, especially when it’s rendered with so little care. Garland may still know how to craft an image or find the right actors, but he’s lost his way in telling stories that stay with us rather than preach the obvious.
Recommendations
I have to admit to being fairly incensed earlier this week when major news outlets dutifully reported that Donald Trump says that abortion law should be left to the states, when A) that’s not what he said; and B) even if he had said that (he said it “will” be left to the states, which it already is since Roe is dead, so congrats on statement of fact), there’s no reason to take anything he says at face value regarding policy because he’s a pathological liar. Perhaps if, like with his deep hatred of migrants, this was something he said and repeated for years, you could accept it. But this is the kind of statement to get wobbly center-right Republicans to a full “yes” even though in their hearts they know Trump would enact a nationwide ban.
Anyway, Jessica Valenti’s Abortion, Every Day makes the case far better (and more often) than I ever could.
And from the media side of things, Parker Molloy has it right that media organizations, in their rush to try and normalize Trump (Look! A policy position! Like a normal candidate!) ran right over the truth of what he said.
Over on 4K, the Ocean’s Trilogy arrives on 4K at the end of this month. In the Goldberg household, the Ocean’s movies are go-to comfort films, especially Ocean’s Eleven. I know there are screenwriters who kind of hate these movies because they’re plot machines that have no friction. That’s not an unfair criticism, but also I don’t care. Sometimes I just want to watch cool, funny guys do a heist without worrying about personal or emotional stakes. Also, to anyone who says Ocean’s Twelve is bad, I will fight you.
Note: I get a small percentage of purchases made through my Amazon Associates link.
What I’m Watching
It’s probably not a great sign that while previous seasons of The Crown had me watching them in under a week, it took me four months to watch the final six episodes of the series. Looking at the totality of the show, it’s clear that they had a much easier time of the first two seasons because they could focus primarily on Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip and the conflict between duty to the Crown and personal sentiment (as represented by how Elizabeth has to wield her power over both her husband and her sister, Margaret). The comeuppance of this, obviously, was down the road with Charles and Diana’s failed marriage. But the more the show focused on Charles, especially in its final two seasons, the more it felt like Palace PR, a way to sanitize the image of other royals with little in the way of questioning the institution or the costs its demands.
This all led to a final episode that tries to have things both ways, where it argues that Elizabeth, by virtue of never seeking the crown, was best in committing to its prestige while those around her only saw the crown as a prize to be won. And yet, the question remains unanswered—is it worth it? Is it all that admirable to give total fealty to an outdated, selfish institution that wields little real power but torments those trying to operate within it? It’s difficult to say “yes” when the last the show gives us of Harry, the current bête noire of the Royal Family, is the fallout from his decision to dress up in a Nazi uniform for Halloween when he was an idiot 20-year-old. As I said in an earlier newsletter, a show that set out to demystify the Royal Family ended up just serving as another front of its PR goals. Having your Philip character say that the institution won’t last after Elizabeth rings hollow if you’re still carrying water for that institution.
What I’m Reading
I finished reading Number Go Up, and loved it. You can really see how in Going Infinite, Michael Lewis got locked into seeing Sam Bankman-Fried as one of his offbeat math geniuses (akin to figures in his previous books, Moneyball and Flash Boys) while missing the bigger picture of crypto’s house of cards. Number Go Up author Zeke Faux, by comparison, not only owns his mistakes in giving SBF too much leeway in earlier interviews, but also goes further to see how cryptocurrencies fail to serve any useful day-to-day purpose (trying to buy a cheeseburger with cryptocurrency is a horrendous ordeal as it takes three minutes to shuffle and convert your crypto from a wallet to an exchange to a vendor), but it’s a great asset to speculators who love gambling and criminals who love the lack of a paper trail. This is all important to keep in mind as the same people who told us crypto/the blockchain/metaverse/web3 were all the future are now pivoting to A.I. with the same promise.
I’ve now moved on to The Norse Myths, which I’ve wanted to know more about since playing the recent God of War games. Plus, after Before the Storm and Number Go Up, I need to get out of the 20th and 21st century for a while when it comes to the books I’m reading.
In other reads:
Suicide Mission by Maureen Tkacik [The American Prospect] - This is a scathing article about how Boeing consistently eviscerated all safety protocols in the name of profits. It’s a great example of how the “free market” is nonsense, and that you need serious regulations. For Boeing, killing hundreds of people isn’t a serious concern; it’s a bad news cycle, and they have PR people for PR problems. If the only goal is to get the stock price to go up, then the incentive isn’t to build the best planes; it’s to cut every corner and make the public pay, possibly with their lives. Anyway, next time you hear about how regulation throttles business, Boeing is a good example of how deregulation kills people.
Google Podcasts is gone — and so is my faith in Google by David Pierce [The Verge] - As someone who still mourns the loss of Google Reader, I get where Pierce is coming from. Google has this problem where even if a product is successful and people like it, there’s nothing to stop them from pivoting to the next shiny object. From Google’s perspective, they think they’re trying to stay ahead of the curve, but really what it means is consistently throwing consumers over the side again and again in the hopes that they’ll bear any transition. As Pierce points out, there’s a limit to putting faith in any product whose lifecycle isn’t determined by how well it performs, but how much time will elapse before the company abandons it for some flimsy reason.
What I’m Hearing
I had fun listening to this Planet Money from back in December about why doctors still use pagers even though the rest of us have moved on to cell phones. It turns out there’s a good reason for that even though there are still clear drawbacks to pagers for medical professionals. Listening to this episode, it feels like there’s a specialty market ready to go with a device that can do more than just show a phone number, but not blow up someone’s phone with texts, chats, images, etc. Like a cell phone from 2005 would seem to be the sweet spot here.
What I’m Playing
I’ve spent over a month with Final Fantasy VII Rebirth now, and I’m still not finished (and kind of wonder how enjoyable it must have been to reviewers who probably had to play it non-stop to make the review embargo). I’m still enjoying it, but now I understand the criticisms of “bloat.” It’s not even so much that there’s so much to do in the way of exploration, which I enjoy, as much as the design philosophy seemed to be, “side quests are gateways to minigames.” There are so many minigames. In one quest, I had to pick mushrooms to help someone with a dish they were making. The act of picking the mushroom? A mini game. Literally judged on how I pulled the mushroom out of the ground. That’s certainly…something. I’m not sure I would qualify it as fun.