Reviews: 'Civil War' and 'The Beast'
Shorter takes on two new sci-fi releases from Alex Garland and Bertrand Bonello
Civil War
The marketing for Alex Garland’s Civil War did the movie no favors. Ahead of its release, studio A24 released a map outlining the different factions in Garland’s divided America.
The two primary groups, at least as far as the actual movie is concerned, are The Loyalists, concentrated around a Don’t-Call-Him-Trump third-term authoritarian in D.C., and The Western Forces, a ludicrous, unexplained alliance between California and Texas.
The New People’s Army and The Florida Alliance also exist in this world, and are even more vaguely defined. That’s largely because Garland has structured Civil War with a deliberately limited perspective, that of a group of four journalists traveling across the war-torn landscape.
Sometimes it works in the movie’s favor, but it often seems like a copout to avoid making an actual political statement.
Two of the journalists, a photographer (Kirsten Dunst!) and a reporter (Wagner Moura), are on their way to interview President Not Trump (Nick Offerman), while the other two (Stephen McKinley Henderson and Cailee Spaeny) are hitching a ride to a staging ground closer to actual combat.
The most interesting aspect of Civil War is the idea of disillusioned image-making. Dunst is a veteran photojournalist, and her disenchantment in documenting scenes of carnage is apparent in nearly every look and gesture. Contrasted with Spaeny’s young, eager, and ambitious photographer, there’s a genuine if played-out dynamic that sticks out amid the endless, empty violence.
As the group makes their way toward D.C., they encounter all manner of horrors: Looters strung up and tortured at a gas station, a dump truck offloading bodies into a mass grave, Jesse Plemons uttering another meme-ready line reading.
Garland renders these moments bluntly and efficiently, with a kineticism that amounts to a contact high. For a movie like this to truly provoke, it has to show more than many bad people on all sides. Because Garland so tactically pulls his punches, we’re left with vague, buzzy references to things like “The Antifa Massacre.”
Were they the slaughterers, or the slaughtered? I guess we’ll have to wait for further entrants in the Civil War Cinematic Universe (CWCU!) to find out.
The Beast
A sci-fi drama about fear and love spanning more than a century, Bertrand Bonello’s The Beast is a slippery, inventive adaptation of a Henry James novella.
Léa Seydoux stars as Gabrielle, a woman living in 2044 Paris who is trying to change with the times. That means undergoing a procedure to remove her emotions and better position her for success in what has become a ruthlessly sparse job market.
To do this, Gabrielle is sent to experience different versions of herself in two distinct periods: Paris in 1910 and Los Angeles in 2014. To do this, she lies in a pool of black liquid as machines try to purge the various traumas that have rippled across lifetimes.
In the present and both pasts, Gabrielle encounters multiple versions of the same man, Louis (George MacKay). In 1910, Gabrielle is married to a dollmaker and yearns for Louis after running into him at a party. Flood and fire loom over their budding flirtation, a more dire threat than any human. In 2014, Gabrielle is an aspiring actress who is housesitting, and Louis is an incel stalking her in between filming increasingly unsettling video rants.
These distinct settings allow Bonello to indulge his genre impulses- the period romance, the thriller- while slyly working them into pieces of his larger futuristic puzzle. This would not be nearly as effective without Seydoux’s shattering performance. The film is structured around Gabrielle’s impulses; each period crescendos and climaxes in different, but not too different, ways.
As sequences are rewound and replayed (by the machines? by Gabrielle?) in each period, it becomes abundantly clear that her emotional core is fighting back. To dull her ability to feel would be a grand tragedy, but so too is being the only one who can still scream.
Both Civil War and The Beast are currently playing in theaters.