"Civil War" Review
Don't Be Fooled: It's Anti-White, Anti-Christian, Anti-American and an Artistic Botch
[4/14/2024: As usual I apologize for mistakes in the first draft. God didn’t give me a 2nd pair of eyes.]
[4/15/2024: I followed this up with my own reimagination of one of the scenes in this silly movie here.]
I only judge a movie on its artistic merits. I don’t have to agree with a movie’s message—and all stories have messages, regardless of cynical quips otherwise—to judge its artistic worth. I just think we should be honest about that message.
One of my favorite movies, Lamerica, made by Italian leftist Gianni Amelio, has a message I disagree with: let refugees in! They’re human, we’re human, borders are unimportant. Sorry, no. I’m that person who says, “you have to keep your head on straight.” We can’t let everyone who wants to come into our country. Pretty soon we’ll have no country.
But a great movie is a great movie, and Lamerica is great—it’s a masterclass in humanistic filmmaking, layering character and plot into a harmonious whole. It touches the heart regardless of your political opinions.1.
I went to see the new movie, Civil War, with high hopes because I’m a sucker for the subject matter and I like the lead actress, Kirsten Dunst. Like all actors she’s gone through ups and downs and I love a comeback story.
Here is what I saw: a bad, dishonest film that didn’t have the courage of its convictions. I will evaluate the film and its marketing campaign.
Have you ever seen a movie that was completely incoherent? In an attempt to make sense of what you’ve seen, you look up reviews. And in one of them you learn key details and say to yourself, “Where’d they get that from?”
Have you ever gone to a movie that was marketed as one thing, and while you were watching you said to yourself, “this is not what they said it was going to be”?
Both have happened to me many times and I used to say to myself, “It’s me, I’m missing something.” Then I learned a dirty little secret about the film industry: critics are part of the Hollywood marketing machine. Their purpose is put seats in seats, not to honestly review a movie. They psyop you into expecting something before you pay for a ticket.
Sometimes it’s a pleasant surprise: Wonder Woman was sold strictly as a superhero, or superheroine, movie, but it was really a romantic comedy. I was OK with that. Sometimes, as in the case of Civil War, it’s to bullshit you about the movie’s fundamental premises.
Before they see the movie in special screenings, critics are sent glossy marketing packages. These packets contain synopses because many movies are made by hacks who can’t tell a story. Critics must be told what the movie is about beforehand otherwise most of the reviews will consist of: “This is incoherent trash. Don’t waste your money.” Can’t have that, the industry would collapse.
This has been going on since forever. An old friend who knew Pauline Kael, the late, notoriously independent New Yorker critic, told me Kael refused to look at marketing materials before she reviewed a movie. She wanted her mind to be uncontaminated. She hated a lot of succes d’estimes, and championed critically-panned movies.2
True to industry form, the new Civil War movie is being marketed as a fair and balanced, “takes no sides” storytelling. This is the headline in Reason magazine’s gushing review:
Civil War Is a Brutal, Intense No-Sidesing of American Political Divisions
I beg to differ.
But first, an artistic assessment.
If I loved the movie and hated the message, I’d say so. But I don’t.
Civil War was a botch, so poorly constructed I was tempted to walk out before the end. The setup went on far longer than it needed to, its themes were repeated over and over, the majority of the narrative consisted of pointless, turgid scenes interspersed with kinetic action scenes. There was no progression or momentum, just lurches amidst exhibitionistic entropy. The music was distracting. I got the feeling that the director had seen Full Metal Jacket too many times.
The characters were trite, stock, cardboard, recycled from a million previous movies. Tough guy girl photojournalist, worshipful neophyte, Wise Black Man, and I’m not sure what trope the leading man was meant to embody. Some new Hispanic thing: the Noble Immigrant? The interpersonal themes (mostly between the gruff older woman and her worshipful admirer) were repeated ad nauseam. Over and over again, we see Kirsten Dunst’s war-weary face—how she suffered being a photojournalist, seeing the worst of humanity! (Why didn’t she just quit?) Dull conversation after dull conversation about the agony and the ecstasy of being a photojournalist. Enough!
Amidst all this prattle over two pedestrian hours we never learn who the main combatants are or why they’re fighting. The characters encounter various militia-types on their journey. If I hadn’t read this review in Reason, I wouldn’t have known this:
The Western Forces (WF), a coalition made up of California and Texas, are making their way toward Washington, D.C., where a president (Nick Offerman) who stayed beyond his second term in office remains. A third faction, the Florida Alliance, is also in play, perhaps in alliance with the WF, perhaps with its own goals.
This is simply not shown or conveyed in the movie. How does the reviewer in Reason know this? He read it in his press package.3
We also never learn the cause of the breakdown. However, we’re instructed that this is a feature, not a bug:
… the nature of the conflict, and the backstory, remains murky.
It's a war movie in which the nature of the dispute is wholly unclear.
The critic is instructing us to think this is a Good Thing. As I’ll show, it’s false.
One of my pet peeves in movies and books is making characters do stupid things just to wedge in a scene. This happens several times in Civil War. Here’s an example. The action follows four journalists, two photographers and two writers, on a journey from NYC to Washington, DC, which has been besieged by insurgents.
At the beginning of their journey, the four journos stop for gas—having left NYC in a giant, shiny Hummer with half a tank of gas and no extra cans of fuel. That’s pretty dumb, isn’t it? I find it hard to believe that four journalists, three of them well-connected, wouldn’t think of this beforehand. They couldn’t rustle up some fuel where they were? They trusted that they’d find gas in deepest, darkest America that’s falling apart? It’s downright idiotic. At least explain why they did this, refer to it, something.4
But they didn’t, and here’s why: running out of gas sets up a scene at a gas station where the main characters encounter local rednecks insurgents who control the supply of gas. And why is this important? In this encounter the bad guys are specifically shown to be Christian. One of the nasty boys is wearing an ostentatious cross. They’re all white. They speak in a hillbilly-Southern twang.5
Am I making too much of one scene? I don’t think so, because the “hostile encounter with menacing white men” is replicated in a later scene. This scene echoes and amplifies the earlier scene.
But in this scene, the men are far worse.
This guy isn’t just a bad hombre who wants you to pay for gas. He’s just finished killing a bunch of people and is dumping their bodies into a lime pit. He’s strikingly blond. No cross.
As he interrogates the characters, we see that he’s a nativist for sure. He asks the journalists and two Chinese companions who came along for the ride where they come from and bluntly says to the two white women (who are from Missouri and Colorado), “that’s America.”
Then he shoots the two Chinese colleagues with the coldness of an SS-man. He cruelly taunts the Hispanic guy and is about to kill him before being dispatched by the Magic Negro driving the Hummer.
This is the stand out scene of the movie, the only scene that’s well-written and tautly played. No wonder the images from it are being used to sell the movie. Why is this the only memorable scene in the movie?
Because there’s a grain of truth to it.
The white population of the US is aging and since 1960 has plummeted. A country that once was nearly 90% white is now 65%. The border is a sieve. There will be a reaction to this. I doubt that we’re going to have mobile killing units, but this scene is a plausible imaginative construction of the sort of man who would become a white nationalist. Its plausibility made it memorable.
The problem I had with these scenes is they aren’t counterbalanced by context. Were there any black gangs roaming around? Hispanic gangs? Left-wing antifa mobs? We’ve got all of them now. They’d be in hog heaven after a breakdown of law and order.
I won’t waste words on the denouement, which was as unconvincing as the previous two hours. If you like shoot ‘em ups, this is your movie.
But those two scenes (and other hints) make it clear that this civil war was caused by Deplorables.
Here are the other hints.
Several times reference is made to “secession.” Secession has a specific meaning in American history and is associated with slavery. It evokes a specific set of emotions. To modern Americans (well, most) it’s a shibboleth word meaning “bad.”
Two other signal words are mentioned: Charlottesville and antifa. There was no reason to mention Charlottesville, it was another cheap, wedged-in manipulation, and antifa is glancingly referred to as “the antifa massacre.” In this case there really was no indication as to whether antifa was massacred or was doing the massacring. Point being, it was just thrown in as a pseudo-clever taunt. It added nothing.
All the good people in this movie are journalists, aid workers, foreigners, and persons of color. Oh those journalists and aid workers, the stalwarts of the liberal fantasy NGO-land! The dreamland utopia where non-deplorables can run society without being elected…
But why even muffle the message?
The Hollywood machine is a dumb, lumbering beast. They know something’s afoot; they know they can’t sell an openly anti-white, anti-Christian movie. So they disguise it slightly, no bludgeons or caricatures or talk about Orange Man and literally Hitler. They prep the critics to tell us that "this movie doesn’t take sides” and people get suckered in. Maybe they even believe it: believing is seeing.
Bad as I think all this is, I’m against whining and complaining about the unfairness of it all.
If you don’t like what’s being offered, write better books and make better movies. Both are possible.
I would love to see a movie about the border.
About migrants streaming into American cities, using up resources, killing Americans, forming gangs, using our insane criminal justice system against us.
About the fentanyl trade.
A country whose finest institutions are run by DEI frauds and plagiarists, in which people who prove this are called racists.
A country in which our military has been degraded by insane fads, and in which our Navy is a shell of its former WW2-winning self.
Where some of its greatest cities (Chicago, St. Louis) are blighted by black gang violence.
Where mobs of imported Islamists and their American-born children chant “Death to America!” in the heartland.
Where men claim they can get pregnant, and compete against women in sports.
Where cops are murdered by criminals with twenty-one convictions.
Where normal people put up with this shit because what are they going to do?
Where anyone who dissents an iota on this is LITERALLY HITLER.
A movie about Nayib Bukele an incorruptible, tough politician who gets elected and actually does something.
Are you up for that, Hollywood?
Civil War represents a new, slightly more sophisticated front on the war against normal Americans. It fools you into thinking that it takes no sides while slandering you.
Don’t be fooled. It is a hate-filled, stupid, anti-white, anti-American, and anti-Christian movie.
Hint: it’s the interesting characters, stupid!
I often disagreed with her judgements but that’s irrelevant. She shot from the hip and gave her honest opinion, which earned her the hatred of many in the industry. She was the subject of a famous takedown by Renata Adler but again, not my point. I admired the fact that she resisted industry attempts to co-opt her.
At the end of the movie, the rebels turn into a large, well-provisioned regular army, which is confusing. During the course of the film, we also see signs of such a regular army, which is also confusing, as its juxtaposed with rag-tag militia types.
I may be wrong about this, but in looking up how far NYC is from DC (204 miles), I think they even get the mileage wrong.
He also had a lolling head and looked at the journalists with a vicious side eye; inbred hillbilly stereotype.