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Join Michael Knowles as he delves into the intense and gripping thriller "Civil War," where America's future hangs in the balance. In this review, Michael explores the film's portrayal of a nation torn apart by internal strife, focusing on a team of military-embedded journalists on a desperate quest to interview the President in Washington, D.C. He examines the film's narrative depth, character development, and its reflection of contemporary political tensions, offering insights that are as thought-provoking as they are entertaining. Tune in to discover whether "Civil War" stands as a cautionary tale that resonates with today's viewers or simply another dystopian adventure.
- Liberal Hollywood makes a movie with some of its top stars in an election year about a supposedly tyrannical presidential figure and the civil war that ensues.
Here we go!
So, Woke Hollywood Again makes actually a pretty good movie.
I will give you my formal, proper review.
The number, based on a scale of 20 for some reason, because my producer, Mr. Davies, took Common Core Math or something.
I will give you the precise review in just a moment.
First, though, I will tell you the story.
I'll set the stage.
There's a president.
He's in his third term.
He has attacked American citizens.
There's an insurrection.
Two groups that are insurrecting against the president are the Western Forces, the WF, and then there's a group out of Florida as well.
We begin with some war journalists, Kirsten Dunst and a guy whose name I forget.
And they're taking photos.
They end up at a hotel and they hatch a plan.
They are going to get to Washington, D.C.
To interview the president and take his picture.
They are joined by their old mentor, played by Stephen Henderson, who's a great actor.
He was in Fences.
He kind of cut his teeth doing August Wilson plays and a lot of Broadway.
A very, very good actor.
And a young girl who wants to be Kirsten Dunst.
And she wants to be a photojournalist.
Kirsten Dunst already, amid the battle, is helping her out.
And you can see the beginning of a mentor-type relationship.
It was initially just going to be Kirsten Dunst and that guy whose name I forget and they're going to drive to DC.
But then the old guy and the young girl tag along and they set off.
The movie is not so much a political harangue or it's not even, it's not even really about Any particular issue.
It's a road trip movie.
It's not even really a war movie.
It's a road trip movie, which are some of my favorite kinds of movies.
And so they're off.
They take off and immediately you see in episode after episode that this war is spreading throughout the country, but you don't really know who's who.
So the Kirsten Dunst character becomes famous for her coverage of the Antifa massacre.
But what does the Antifa massacre even mean?
Is it that Antifa massacred people?
Is it that Antifa was massacred?
Remains totally unclear.
Presumably the president is kind of a Trump figure because the popular culture says that Trump is tyrannical and blah blah blah.
But he doesn't really act like Trump.
And if he is a Trump guy, then are the insurrectionists the good guys?
They're kind of portrayed as the bad guys.
Didn't the American right during the Obama administration present Barack Obama as a tyrant?
Who's who?
We just don't know.
There are two elements of woke in the movie.
The first one is that pretty much all the bad guys are white guys.
Pretty much?
Kind of?
And pretty much all the good guys are not white guys, they're either racial minorities or women.
That guy, Jesse Plemons, I think his name is, who now plays just every villainous white guy, middle American character in every single show and movie.
He plays a really, really bad guy who is just executing civilians and who almost kills the young girl journalist.
Some other racial minority journalists who joined the fray.
That's kind of woke.
You know, white guy bad, everyone else good.
The even woker element of the movie is not pro-Democrat or anti-Republican.
The wokest element of the movie is the pretense that journalists are objective.
From the beginning, Kirsten Dunst is teaching this young photojournalist girl that in order to do their jobs, they just need to go and take the photos.
When they stumble on a couple of guys being tortured by white guys at a gas station, the young journalist feels an impulse to help the guys.
The people being tortured.
And Kirsten Dunn says no.
Our job is not to help.
Our job is not to hurt.
Our job is not to really be involved in any way.
We're just there to document.
We're totally neutral observers.
And that, of course, is what the journalists think about themselves.
But that's not how journalism actually works.
This is what we hear from the libs all the time.
The journalists, we're the fourth estate, we're under attack by the conservative forces in America, but we're valiantly speaking truth to power.
But they never do that, of course.
And journalists never really did that.
I'm not saying there's no such thing as a war correspondent that shows some bravery.
Of course, that exists.
But journalism broadly does not exist just to tell the story neutrally.
Journalists are mouthpieces and propagandists for respective political sides.
That's really always what it had been in American history.
That's why you have newspapers like the Tennessee Democrat, for instance.
And then after the Second World War, all the liberal journalists just pretended to be neutral, even though you'd have someone like Walter Cronkite.
You know, Mr. Objectivity, Walter Cronkite was a world federalist, okay, he was a huge lib, and that's true of so many of them.
So that part, I felt, was woke and lib, but kind of unwittingly so, in a way that most people probably on both sides of the aisle would accept.
Now, how does the movie end?
We'll get to that in just one second.
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Warning!
Spoilers ahead.
They move in on Washington, D.C.
The insurrectionist forces are there.
The president seems like he's fleeing, but that smart journalist Kirsten Dunst, she knows.
He's still in the White House.
So they go in, they find him.
There's a little creativity here in that the White House press briefing room is just in the White House, which is not true.
It's actually a little separate building off to the side.
But the forces make it in there, they see the White House spokesman, the press secretary, and she's trying to negotiate the release.
The insurrectionist forces just shoot her.
Shoot her dead.
You're wondering, okay, is this a pro-Republican thing or a Trump thing or this?
But it's very unclear.
The White House Press Secretary is a black woman in the liberal victim hierarchy.
This is a very sympathetic character.
And she is being rebuffed and interrogated by another black woman.
And then there's a man, and it's very unclear.
Are these insurrectionists the good guys?
I thought insurrectionists were the bad guys.
But the president had a third term, and he was killing American citizens, and it's just totally, totally ambiguous which side is which.
They make it in, and they find the president.
They surround him, and the journalist, the guy whose name I keep forgetting, finally says, stop, stop, don't shoot, stop.
And you're waiting here for the journalist to say it's wrong to kill the president.
And he says, before you shoot him, I gotta get a quote.
Because I drove all the way across the country, and I need to get a quote, and I need to get a picture.
And the quote, another big spoiler here, says, Mr. President, you have a quote.
He says, don't let them shoot me.
Don't stop them from killing me.
And he says, OK, that'll do.
They shoot him.
He gets his picture.
As all this is happening.
The increasingly aggressive young girl who wants to be the Kirsten Dunst character, she's being bolder and bolder and bolder.
She's taking photo after photo after photo, and she's in the line of fire for the president's forces.
Kirsten Dunst sees this.
She jumps in to push her out of the way.
Kirsten Dunst gets shot herself.
And as she falls dying, the young photographer girl snaps her picture, snaps her death, which is a callback to a setup earlier on in the movie When the young girl asks Kirsten Dunst, if I were to be shot, would you photograph my death?
Kirsten Dunst says, what do you think?
Implying that the job is just about documenting.
You've got to kill your feelings.
You have to kill your desires.
You are just there to observe and to snap that camera.
All other desires have to go out the window.
And so you get this lovely callback and inversion of that by the end of the movie.
That part does not really speak so well of journalists, necessarily.
It plays into the mythology of journalism.
But it also portrays the journalists as psychopaths who are just power hungry, extremely ambitious, and trying to get clicks.
You know, trying to create the kind of content that will attract a lot of attention.
They would say, perhaps, they're doing it for historical purposes.
To get the truth out there, a more cynical viewer would say, you know, you're doing it just so that you get more eyeballs on your pictures.
That's a big question here.
The journalists are supposed to be totally focused on the truth.
The truth above all things.
We see in the real world today.
Despite what they may say, journalists increasingly mocking the idea of the truth.
Just this week, just as the movie is coming out, you have the new CEO of NPR mocking the very notion of truth and saying, you know, we don't want to be guided just by the truth.
Everyone has their own truths, man, you know.
We want to be guided by something other than the truth, which of course is true in the real life of journalism.
They kill the president, and then it ends with pictures.
Of these insurrectionists standing around the president's dead body.
The movie overall, pretty good because of that.
Nobody's totally a hero.
Kirsten Dunst is probably the closest to it.
Nobody's totally the villain.
It's not a political harangue in any way.
It's just kind of a fun thriller.
The acting is excellent.
Stephen Henderson, who plays the old guy, is really an excellent character actor.
They were all pretty good.
Even the young girl, who's not quite as seasoned as the other ones, she turns in a pretty good performance, too.
It's all good.
It's actually, oddly enough, At the time that we're all complaining about how Hollywood is too woke and beating us over the head with its politics, this movie, which is on the surface extremely political, is a breath of fresh air because it's just kind of a fun thriller.
So on the scale of lame to epic, pure moviemaking, zero being lame, ten being epic, I'd give it a Seven.
Seven or eight.
Maybe even eight.
I mean, you know what?
I'm feeling generous today.
Let's give it an eight.
Let's give it a seven and a half.
Seven and a half.
Am I allowed to do halves?
I don't care.
It's my show.
I'll do halves.
Then, on the scale of woke to trad, zero being woke, ten being trad, Four?
It's almost totally neutral.
It's too nice to journalists.
That's really the only problem.
And it's a little tough on white guys.
Four and a half out of four and a half.
So what does that give me?
Four and a half plus seven and a half.
Carry the four out of three.
So what, about twelve?
Twelve out of twenty?
Pretty good.
Now this stupid scale that my producer Mr. Davies came up with is really counterintuitive.
Anything 10 and over is watchable.
It's actually, that's a pretty good score.
I would recommend it because it is addressing oppressing anxiety.
People on both sides of the aisle really do feel like the country is coming apart.
And they're right about that.
The country actually is coming apart and the civil society is fraying.
This was a way to deal with that.
That doesn't exacerbate the problem.
Had Hollywood come out with a Civil War movie that were totally one-sided and said, you know, Republicans are tearing the country apart and Trump is a threat to democracy or whatever nonsense they would say, that would have been pretty bad, no matter how good the movie was.
But that's not what they did.
They're tapping into a cultural anxiety, dealing with it in a way that leaves a lot of the interpretation up to the audience, and ultimately discouraging civil war.
There are some people who are really gung-ho for civil war, on the left and on the right.
I'm not.
Because if there were to be a civil war, that would entail me, I don't know, like shooting my cousins or something, right?
Call me a wallflower, but that doesn't really interest me.
And Kirsten Dunst has a line in the movie, she says, I covered these wars overseas, and I thought the one bit of activism that could come out of it is just by showing the story, it would warn people not to do this here, but here we are.
Another recurring theme that their relatives, they're just on the farm somewhere.
They're just pretending this isn't happening.
They actually walk into a town that's just pretending that it's not occupied, that the civil society hasn't unraveled.
There's a shop owner just saying, yeah, try to ignore it.
I try not to watch the news too much.
And it's very unclear if this war reporting is doing anything.
I mean, they get to the end there.
The mentors died trying to save them.
He ends up getting shot.
And they say he gave his life for nothing.
Because they're taking all these pictures, but who's even looking at them?
Most of the people that we encounter in the movie, they're not even paying attention to the news.
So it's just, oddly enough, for a just kind of silly summer thriller, it touches on these social questions with a great deal of sophistication.
And that's a good movie.
And then they get the guy from Parks and Rec to be the president.
Nick Offerman.
Kind of a funny little cameo performance.
I know, I went in expecting to hate it.
It had all the ingredients to be absolutely odious.
