Tag: Alex Garland

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Civil War

Kirsten Dunst is riveting in her role as photojournalist Lee Smith.

“I find that violence is very ambiguous in movies. For example, some films claim to be antiwar, but I don’t think I’ve really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war.”

Since Francois Truffaut, the great French filmmaker and critic, said that to Gene Siskel in a 1972 interview, many have speculated what he meant. Film and military propaganda have gone together practically since the invention of the medium. There are any number of great films that are antiwar in intent: All Quiet on the Western Front, Paths of Glory, and Apocalypse Now, just to name a few. But what I think Truffaut was getting at is that, for filmmakers, combat is just too sexy. There are the life or death stakes that plotting thrives on, plenty of kinetic motion, and lots of explosions. Who doesn’t love a good explosion?

And that is precisely the problem. Even if you want to condemn militarism, wanton killing, destruction, and weaponized rape, the viewer is going to thrill to the exciting images and start rooting for one side to “win.” But this isn’t college football, this is human tragedy.

Alex Garland makes his intentions quite clear in Civil War. Early in the film, photographer Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) muses to her old friend Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) that when she sent images of war zones back to home to America, the implicit message was “Don’t do this! And, here we are …”

In this undefined near future, the United States has fractured into four warring alliances of states: The Loyalists, who stuck with the former Union after the unnamed President (Nick Offerman) took on an unconstitutional third term; the New People’s Army of the Northwest; and the Florida Alliance, which is basically the old Confederacy except for Texas, which has joined California in the Western Forces.

Sitting in a hotel lobby in Manhattan, Sammy convinces Lee and her writer partner Joel (Wagner Moura) to let him join them on a trip to Washington, D.C., where the President is besieged in the White House. Sammy compares the situation to the “race to Berlin,” when the Nazi war machine collapsed in 1945, and Russian and American forces pulled out all of the stops to see who could grab the most territory before the surrender. (A weary Sammy observes that, once D.C. falls, the other factions will inevitably turn on each other.)

The only thing that matters now is how the President goes down, and that’s the story Lee and Joel are after. The other passenger in their beat-up Ford Expedition is Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a novice photographer who idolizes Lee. But Lee doesn’t think Jessie’s got what it takes to witness war and make news content out of it — or maybe, it’s that Lee sees herself in Jessie, before her heart went hard from watching countless people die.

Making the hero of the piece a journalist instead of a soldier is Garland’s way to make an actual antiwar film. The road trip across the Northeast is alternately harrowing and surreal — often both at once, as in the scene where Lee and Joel, caught between two dueling sniper teams, hide in a suburban yard decorated for Christmas.

Garland takes inspiration from the breathless suspense of Children of Men, The Thin Red Line’s moments of transcendence amidst the carnage, and the journey into ultimate darkness of the aforementioned Apocalypse Now. But the film Civil War most closely resembles is Full Metal Jacket, which director Stanley Kubrick described as being about “the phenomenon of war.” Lee’s journalistic perspective lends the story objectivity. As she follows one unit of irregulars through a pitched firefight, we start to root for them. Then, Garland undercuts the emotional connection, as Lee photographs the victors gleefully machine gunning their prisoners.

It’s Kirsten Dunst’s job to make sure Kubrickian clinical detachment doesn’t sour into misanthropy. She’s absolutely riveting. As the horrors mount, Lee’s hard facade is slowly chipped away. Watching Jessie lose her rookie idealism and embrace the thrill of battle only makes it worse.

Civil War is as brilliant as it is harrowing. It’s been 160 years since we’ve seen real war in North America, even as we have been inundated with images of conflict from all over the world. This is not a film about who is right and who is wrong in our current political struggle. It’s about what war looks like up close — and what America will look like if the better angels of our nature fail.

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Annihilation

As University of Memphis Film Professor Marina Levina likes to say, all horror is rooted in body horror. From the bloody dismemberment of slasher films to vile mutations of David Cronenberg, the entire genre rests on a bedrock of biological revulsion. The principle extends all the way back to the work where sci fi and horror first converged. The star of Frankenstein was a monster stitched together out of discarded body parts. Feminist critics have pointed out that, at the time Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, she had recently had a miscarriage. The darkest fears of humanity are rooted in the squirmy realities of our reproduction.

Annihilation, the new film from Ex Machina director Alex Garland, begins with a bit of biology. Lena (Natalie Portman) is lecturing her class at Johns Hopkins University over video of dividing cells. All life, she says, has its origins in this simple event, before revealing that the cells on the screen are cancer.

Lena met her husband Kane (Oscar Isaac) while they were both in the Army. She got out, but he stayed and became an elite special forces fighter. A year ago, he left for a secret mission and was never seen again. Lena never got any word from the government on what happened to him, and had given him up for dead — until he suddenly shows up at their house with very little memory of what has transpired. But Lena’s emphatic questioning is interrupted when Kane has a seizure. On the way to the hospital, the ambulance is intercepted by government vehicles, and soon Lena wakes up in a mysterious hospital room with no recollection of how she got there.

This won’t be the first time Lena wakes up disoriented in this creepy, slow burn thriller. Dr. Ventress (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a government psychologist, reveals to her that Kane’s mission was to Area X, a spot on the swampy Gulf Coast that is surrounded by a mysterious shimmer, some kind of visible force field that appears like a giant soap bubble. The shimmer first appeared three years ago, and it has been steadily growing in size. No one who has gone in has ever come out — except Kane, and the authorities are unsure how he got from the Gulf Coast to Baltimore without anyone noticing. As Kane clings to life, Lena is recruited on a desperate mission to get to the lighthouse at the center of Area X. What the team of four women finds will be crucial to preserving the future of life on earth.

Natalie Portman stars in Annihilation, Alex Garland’s new sci-fi/horror film.

Annihilation is adapted from the novel of the same name by Jeff VanderMeer, but its concept has deep roots in H.P. Lovecraft’s 1927 “The Colour Out of Space,” where a meteorite brings a strange chromatic plague to the swamps of New England, and Roadside Picnic, a 1971 Russian science-fiction novel where teams of dragooned men must brave a zone where the laws of physics break down in order to recover alien artifacts. Garland’s pacing and staging take inspiration from Stalker, Andrei Tarkovsky’s adaption of Roadside Picnic. Inside Area X, Lena and her crew find both wonders and horror, with rainbow-colored plants and half-human monsters.

Portman is the focus of the picture, and she carries the weight of the production with the same kind of calm professionalism her “warrior scientist” exudes when being presented with mind-bending sights and concepts. Jason Leigh, the secretive leader of the expedition, is uncharacteristically wooden in the first half, but loosens up as the going gets weirder and more paranoid. Isaac’s role is barely there in this female-driven story, but in a series of cleverly constructed flashbacks, his charisma provides relief from the horror slog through the psychedelic swamps.

But the acting, while serviceable, is not really the point. Lena and Kane’s relationship drama feels like a distraction from Garland’s mixture of horror beats and big think concepts. Even as it relies on horror tropes for shape (why do a group of trained scientists and soldiers insist on splitting up like they’re in the Blair Witch Project?) Annihilation‘s mission is to plumb the depths of Lovecraftian existential fear. The universe is a big and scary place that cares nothing about the problems of two little people, or even one little planet.

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Film Features Film/TV

Ex Machina

For the best reviews of the new cyborg flick Ex Machina, go read the comments on the movie’s YouTube trailer. There, you will find a variety of good observations, such as, “Why is the A.I. almost always female?”; “Maybe if people would stop treating their A.I.’s like shit then they wouldn’t go nuts and want to kill everyone”; and “I think this movie is made for the blow up doll fanciers. What Sick Bastards, that makes us humanize toaster ovens.”

I will confirm Ex Machina is a movie about “humanize[d] toaster ovens” that are created by a sick bastard. The film follows Caleb (Domnhall Gleeson), a young programmer who has won a vaguely defined online contest. His prize is a week with Nathan (Oscar Isaac), a genius billionaire who lives alone on a Norwegian estate that looks like a cross between Camp David and Rivendell.  

Ex Machina

Nathan is a supposedly chill dude (spoiler alert: he’s not really chill) who also happens to be developing cutting-edge robots. He needs Caleb, a freshman with a big heart, to interact with a robot named Ava in order to determine whether or not she has achieved sentience. Caleb is in over his head and knows it, but he is too curious to back out of the increasingly weird circumstances. Nathan, meanwhile, is revealed as an unstable alcoholic who abuses his sole employee, a beautiful, silent servant named Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno).

We first meet the robot Ava (Alicia Vikander plus a team of motion-graphics artists) from Caleb’s perspective: She is silhouetted against a window in her locked chambers. She has a shy, sad-eyed, Natalie Portman vibe. Her artificial face is prosthetically masked with human features, but her body looks like a shapely version of the see-through computer my nerdy high school boyfriend once built. When Caleb is allowed to speak to her through a glass, Ava points out that she understands his “microexpressions.” She can tell he likes her, maybe too much. From there, Ex Machina is standard fare, as conjectural parallel realities go: Boy meets Robot. Boy loves Robot. But Robot is a robot. What will become of Boy?

Alicia Vikander as Ava


The script, while competent, is laden with grating cultural reference. Nathan and Caleb cite Prometheus while they drink wine and eat sushi. In one scene, Nathan explains his life philosophy through the extended metaphor of a Jackson Pollock painting. Caleb, for his part, regularly says things like “If you’ve created a conscious machine, it’s not the history of man. That’s the history of gods!”

For a movie about the stunning reach of tech, the tech in Ex Machina is weirdly campy. In order to gain entrance to the most preciously guarded scientific research facility in the world, all Caleb has to do is pickpocket a key card, the kind you get at Days Inn. The sci-fi logic of the film, which could make it worthwhile, also falls flat. When Nathan gives Caleb a tour of the A.I. batcave, a room scattered with detached prosthetics and eerie light tables, he holds up a brain-shaped piece of glowy glass and tells Caleb it is the A.I.’s mind. Thought sequences, he explains, are downloaded in real time from billions of searches. Imagine what it would actually be like to talk to something that formed its reality based on web searches. I just typed “What is…” into Google and the second and third suggested searches — based on some seriously high-level algorithmic intelligence — were “What is Coachella?” and “What is a thot?” There may be some epistemological problems with crowd-sourcing.

A version of Ex Machina told from Ava’s perspective would have been infinitely more interesting. Near the end of the movie, Ava tries to make herself look human by donning a wig and applying layer after layer of prosthetic skin to her robot body. She stares in the mirror, investigating her weird, new self. Save yourself the trouble of seeing this movie and instead go read Donna Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto, where she describes cyborgs as “the final appropriation of women’s bodies in a masculinist orgy of war.” It’s a start.