'Civil War' is a hackneyed portrait of war correspondents in the thick of it

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Directed by Alex Garland, the film is about an ideological conflict in which ideologies are never discussed. 'The movie manages to be exploitative while lacking the nerve of an exploitation picture,' reviews critic Sean Burns.

What we’ve got here is failure to communicate. Writer-director Alex Garland’s “Civil War” begins with a provocative — some might even say incendiary — scenario that the film has no interest in explaining. At an unspecified time in what looks to be the very near future, the U.S.

Garland has a clunky way of summarizing what scenes are supposed to be about in his dialogue, instead of actually, like, dramatizing them. For example, we can tell that Lee’s being extra hard on Jessie because the kid reminds her of her younger self thanks to Henderson taking Dunst aside and saying: “You’re being extra hard on her because she reminds you of yourself.” “Civil War” often feels like the actors are reading aloud from an outline instead of a script.

Neither political party is mentioned in the film, nor is any religion — which for a film about violent conflict in the United States is basically insane. Instead, we hear cagey mentions of stuff like “the Antifa massacre,” allowing the audience room to assume who did the massacring according to whatever biases we’ve brought into the theater. Some critics call this clever. I think it’s pretty cowardly.

At least I assume they were snipers. I couldn’t actually see them because at a public preview screening earlier this week, the AMC Boston Common projected “Civil War” cropped to the wrong aspect ratio, hacking off crucial picture information from the top and bottom of the frame. After 15 years of botched press screenings at the city’s sloppiest venue, I’ve become resigned to such incompetence.

that have excellent projection, and if you want to see the whole picture you need to choose wisely where you go.

 

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