Slow to start, but once it picked up steam, it was extremely intense. Some disliked the fact that the movie didn’t take an ideological position that validated their own, but I didn’t care about all that. It was just a really well made, scary, and often nerve-wracking Thriller. Worth a rewatch.
Some of the criticisms I’ve heard so far about Civil War, to paraphrase but a few:
“The characters have no backstories… We don’t know any more about them at the end of the movie than we did at the beginning… Since we don’t get to know them as characters, we don’t care about what happens to them when bad things happen… The writer-director doesn’t seem to have anything more to say on the subject of his film other than ‘War is hell’, which is not only uninteresting, but cowardly… None of what’s shown in the film is given any context, or point of view, so none of it means anything; it’s just sound and fury signifying nothing.”
37 years ago, I remember hearing very similar criticisms about Full Metal Jacket: “The characterizations are thin. Too many of the actors deliver their lines in an unrealistic monotone, like robots. The movie has no opinion on the morality of the Vietnam War. And, besides, THERE WERE NO PALM TREES IN HUE!”.
Now, I’m not saying Civil War’s on the same artistic/aesthetic level as Stanley Kubrick’s classic Vietnam film…just as I wouldn’t have said, in the summer of 1987, that Full Metal Jacket was on the same level as Oliver Stone’s Platoon.
What I will say is that, much like Full Metal Jacket, Alex Garland’s Civil War affected me on an emotional/psychological level which was very similar to my reaction while watching Kubrick’s masterpiece for the first time on the big screen. Unlike Stone’s Platoon, which I had seen and loved just a few months earlier in the same theater, when I walked out of Full Metal Jacket, I had no idea what Kubrick was trying to ‘say’ with his film…except that War Is Hell.
It didn’t matter to me that Kubrick’s grunt characters, unlike Stone’s, were relative ciphers, providing little or no backstory about themselves, who spoke their oddly crafted lines of dialogue with little or no emotion.
What mattered to me was that I’d experienced a visceral reaction to the stressors those characters faced throughout the story, whether that stressor was a Marine Corps DI who wouldn’t hesitate to choke, slap or gut punch a recruit to get his points across, or a VC sniper methodically wounding GIs from an unseen elevated position in order to lure those GIs’ buddies out into the line of fire.
The tension Kubrick sustained with both the first and second halves of Full Metal Jacket was unlike anything I’d seen in a combat movie up to that point. Platoon was a film driven by emotion, with clearly defined Good Guys and Bad Guys. Full Metal Jacket took a more clinical approach to the Vietnam combat movie and, as a result, delivered a far greater psychological punch.
I’d really been moved by Platoon, but Full Metal Jacket shook me to my core and left me literally feeling numb…and I say that as someone who’d seen Apocalypse Now in a theater just eight years earlier (when I was ten). To be blunt, when I walked out of the theater during Full Metal Jacket’s end credits, I was in a mild state of shock. I felt as if I hadn’t just watched a movie…I’d lived it. And I was relieved to be walking out of the theater.
Tonight, Civil War didn’t have quite that effect on me. I’ve seen too many high-intensity war/combat movies since the summer of ’87. During the film tonight, however, I was viscerally engaged, i.e. my stomach was in knots due to the tension the film was ratcheting up. It didn’t matter to me that characters weren’t making emotional appeals with expository dialogue (backstories).
Once the bullets started flying, backstory or not, I didn’t want to see anybody get shot. Maybe that’s just me. Maybe some people need perfunctory backstory/exposition in order to relate to a character. Maybe it just makes me a cheap date because I don’t. A perilous situation, expertly depicted onscreen, for me, will suffice.
A skilled filmmaker can tap into those primal fears with or without exposition/backstories. Example? Chrissy Watkins, the first victim of the shark in Jaws. Before the character’s attacked, we’re given very little information on that character, no backstory. Within a minute or so of Chrissy’s introduction, she’s swimming out to sea. Then she’s taken by the shark. Horrifically so. It makes a vivid impression on the audience, in spite of the fact that we never see the fish during the attack.
Speaking of Full Metal Jacket, which of that film’s principal characters were given backstories? Private Joker wrote for his school paper. That’s it. That’s all we were given. Gunnery Sergeant Hartman. What was his backstory? How about Leonard, aka Private Pyle? No backstory whatsoever. That lack of backstory didn’t really affect the impact those characters, particularly Hartman and Pyle, had on viewers. In spite of that lack of backstory, those two characters from Full Metal Jacket are the two that everyone remembers.
Backstory’s overrated, IMO.
And as far as those far Right/far Left critics irritated that Civil War didn’t “pick a side” ideologically…
In 1971, there were a few critics who dismissed Sam Peckinpah’s Straw Dogs for deliberately excluding references to campus protests over the Vietnam War. In early drafts of the film’s screenplay, Dustin Hoffman’s character flees the U.S. for rural England due to not wanting to get involved in those campus protests.
However, Peckinpah wasn’t making a statement on Vietnam with Straw Dogs. Personally, Peckinpah disagreed with U.S. involvement in Vietnam. He also knew that inserting overt criticism into the film would inevitably date it, as well as distract from the point he was really making, i.e. that Hoffman’s character was a shallow, passive-aggressive social vandal whose superiority complex escalates to homicide. Or, maybe that’s just the point that I took away from the film. I get confused sometimes.
Either way, Straw Dogs remains a classic to this day, in spite of the fact that its filmmaker chose, much like the film’s main character, to not “take a stand”, i.e. plant an ideological flag for the approval of like-minded viewers, despite how fashionable it might have been for him to do so at the time the film was made.
Personally, I’m glad Alex Garland opted to keep his film neutral…objective, if you will…much like the journalist characters headlining his film. I, for one, can appreciate when a filmmaker doesn’t make it so easy for me as to tell me how I’m supposed to think. I don’t require a filmmaker’s politics to line up with my own in order to appreciate and enjoy their work.
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