Thank you! I'm in the process of writing my first book that is also looking at future conflicts and opportunities, so I'm sure I came into this movie overly excited and with quite a bit of bias.
On another note, I'm 100% with you on the "Girls State" documentary pushing the alignment of youth into clearly defined conservative/liberal camps and this not being representative of reality.
Super valuable reviews, I will use your Substack to guide future movie nights.
Regarding Civil War, a movie I feel is very much worth watching, there were some aspects that thoroughly annoyed me:
1. When the main characters are at the gas station and imply that Canadian dollars are worth so much more than US dollars in this dystopian world, it’s just laughable: Canada is going through similar social tensions as the US and has a similar monetary policy. Of course, there could be a scenario where the Canadian dollar stays stable compared to the US dollar, but there is just a glaring omission of crypto here that irritates me. If the dollar goes to nothing, Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptos will have shot up in dollar terms making them obvious candidates for post-hyperinflation commerce.
2. The main journalists in the movie work for Reuters and the New York Times. The same seems to go for all the other cool journalists in the hotel meet up, as well as those they run into later in the movie: They all work for major publications that we know today. This means that they are totally ignoring the smaller, often more unbiased and more original independent journalists like those that choose to publish on Substack today and those brave individuals that are producing a lot of the photos, videos and commentary in the Ukraine and Gaza wars just using their smartphones. The producers of this movie effectively laugh at these newer, smaller creators by omitting them and paying lip service to the good, old mainstream.
3. The country and its biggest cities are shown as a total wasteland because of the failure of government. Everything turns into chaos, abject violence and war. In my opinion this is a false assumption about human nature: If the top levels of our governments disappeared, I believe it would take us quite a while to even notice, if it’s not blared at us through the media. But the movie goes even further and ridicules the families of the female leads who are “on their farms pretending none of this is happening”. It also depicts the town that is peaceful and ignoring the war in a condescending way, briefly showing the allure of this isolated, harmonious existence before attempting to “pull up the curtain” and invalidate the fairytale by showing gunmen on the roofs of the town’s buildings. Ultimately, gunmen or not, these townspeople are presenting a potentially superior societal model than our current big country model and the movie brushed over it, instead implying that the WF and other similar factions will fight it out and we will land in a new status quo not so different from the current one.
In the end, I find that behind the smoke and mirrors of edgy violence and a captivating (yet as you say, somewhat superficial) storyline this movie is actually quite bland, as it just panders to the current power systems. It does this instead of taking the opportunity to show viable, more equitable, less centralized alternatives made possible by new technologies like the internet and crypto that do not require overlords, democratically elected or not, for people to be able to organize in a harmonious way.
Hi there. Thanks for the comment! I don't think I have the bandwidth to notice so many details, but I do agree that the idea, while cool on paper, is executed a bit blandly. While I personally overlooked story details to focus on the journalistic theme, I do understand why people like to know how things ended up the way they did. World building matters.
Hey Joe! I enjoyed your take on Civil War. Personally I enjoyed it thoroughly (which places me in something of a minority it seems), although I wonder if you agree with me that the discourse around the film has really been sub par? If I have to read one more review where someone says "California and Texas teaming up is the hardest part of the film to believe" or that the film "doesn't say anything" I might just run into a brick wall. Perhaps me being a non-American there is less of a powder keg of emotions attached to the concept, but largely I am glad to see a review that doesn't concern itself entirely with the minutiae of the film and instead as a sum of its parts. Great review!
Hi there. Thanks for the comment! I don't think you're in the minority. The film has pretty solid reviews and the audience reaction has been relatively positive. I agree with you that people have focused on aspects of the story that are, at least for me, irrelevant. The film flirts with an alternative history, of sorts, not unlike Inglorious Basterds, that isn't necessarily based on our present partisan divisions but merely imagining what political strife of such magnitude would look like in the U.S. I think it was very clever to make journalists the key protagonists and our eyes to witness the conflict and make war a backdrop to a story that is more about what it would feel like to document such a chapter in history. My gripe with the film is that it didn't do this very well. The narrative feels choppy and the characters aren't particularly likable and don't embody the kind of journalistic curiosity one would expect given the stakes. My extra two cents... lol
Thank you! I'm in the process of writing my first book that is also looking at future conflicts and opportunities, so I'm sure I came into this movie overly excited and with quite a bit of bias.
On another note, I'm 100% with you on the "Girls State" documentary pushing the alignment of youth into clearly defined conservative/liberal camps and this not being representative of reality.
Super valuable reviews, I will use your Substack to guide future movie nights.
Regarding Civil War, a movie I feel is very much worth watching, there were some aspects that thoroughly annoyed me:
1. When the main characters are at the gas station and imply that Canadian dollars are worth so much more than US dollars in this dystopian world, it’s just laughable: Canada is going through similar social tensions as the US and has a similar monetary policy. Of course, there could be a scenario where the Canadian dollar stays stable compared to the US dollar, but there is just a glaring omission of crypto here that irritates me. If the dollar goes to nothing, Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptos will have shot up in dollar terms making them obvious candidates for post-hyperinflation commerce.
2. The main journalists in the movie work for Reuters and the New York Times. The same seems to go for all the other cool journalists in the hotel meet up, as well as those they run into later in the movie: They all work for major publications that we know today. This means that they are totally ignoring the smaller, often more unbiased and more original independent journalists like those that choose to publish on Substack today and those brave individuals that are producing a lot of the photos, videos and commentary in the Ukraine and Gaza wars just using their smartphones. The producers of this movie effectively laugh at these newer, smaller creators by omitting them and paying lip service to the good, old mainstream.
3. The country and its biggest cities are shown as a total wasteland because of the failure of government. Everything turns into chaos, abject violence and war. In my opinion this is a false assumption about human nature: If the top levels of our governments disappeared, I believe it would take us quite a while to even notice, if it’s not blared at us through the media. But the movie goes even further and ridicules the families of the female leads who are “on their farms pretending none of this is happening”. It also depicts the town that is peaceful and ignoring the war in a condescending way, briefly showing the allure of this isolated, harmonious existence before attempting to “pull up the curtain” and invalidate the fairytale by showing gunmen on the roofs of the town’s buildings. Ultimately, gunmen or not, these townspeople are presenting a potentially superior societal model than our current big country model and the movie brushed over it, instead implying that the WF and other similar factions will fight it out and we will land in a new status quo not so different from the current one.
In the end, I find that behind the smoke and mirrors of edgy violence and a captivating (yet as you say, somewhat superficial) storyline this movie is actually quite bland, as it just panders to the current power systems. It does this instead of taking the opportunity to show viable, more equitable, less centralized alternatives made possible by new technologies like the internet and crypto that do not require overlords, democratically elected or not, for people to be able to organize in a harmonious way.
Hi there. Thanks for the comment! I don't think I have the bandwidth to notice so many details, but I do agree that the idea, while cool on paper, is executed a bit blandly. While I personally overlooked story details to focus on the journalistic theme, I do understand why people like to know how things ended up the way they did. World building matters.
Hey Joe! I enjoyed your take on Civil War. Personally I enjoyed it thoroughly (which places me in something of a minority it seems), although I wonder if you agree with me that the discourse around the film has really been sub par? If I have to read one more review where someone says "California and Texas teaming up is the hardest part of the film to believe" or that the film "doesn't say anything" I might just run into a brick wall. Perhaps me being a non-American there is less of a powder keg of emotions attached to the concept, but largely I am glad to see a review that doesn't concern itself entirely with the minutiae of the film and instead as a sum of its parts. Great review!
Hi there. Thanks for the comment! I don't think you're in the minority. The film has pretty solid reviews and the audience reaction has been relatively positive. I agree with you that people have focused on aspects of the story that are, at least for me, irrelevant. The film flirts with an alternative history, of sorts, not unlike Inglorious Basterds, that isn't necessarily based on our present partisan divisions but merely imagining what political strife of such magnitude would look like in the U.S. I think it was very clever to make journalists the key protagonists and our eyes to witness the conflict and make war a backdrop to a story that is more about what it would feel like to document such a chapter in history. My gripe with the film is that it didn't do this very well. The narrative feels choppy and the characters aren't particularly likable and don't embody the kind of journalistic curiosity one would expect given the stakes. My extra two cents... lol