by Thor

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“Audience member, there’s a problem at the cineplex, a little girl is losing faith in journalism!” 

Civil War appeared, prior to its release, to be a hysteric cryfest. An indie style bedwetting about January 6th and all of the neuroses carried within the liberal mind since the Presidency of Mango Mussolini. To my leaden dismay it was none of those things. 

Civil War attempts to be a character focused reflection on war journalism amidst the backdrop of a sequel American Civil War fought over…who fuckin knows. For a film about America, by Americans, that clearly has enough point of view to recognize the present moment vibrates somewhere in the same register by holding its cards so tight to its chest they may as well be welded on. A baffling choice, because if you’re going to do a recast of the Spanish Civil War with California , Texas, and Florida (maybe?) as the coalition, you need to explain to me who are the communists and who are the anarchists. How exactly did the Oath Keepers and MS13 start hooking up? 

Civil War might honestly be a blazing satire if I could manage to convince myself that it was about the lethargic resignation of normal people to the concept of even having a country. In some ways it tracks, here we have a movie centered around journalists, some of the most self-important, clucking gossips alive and you can’t find two opinions to rub together in the whole movie about the crack-up of the nation they LIVE IN. It’s jarring when halfway through the movie they arrive in a town untouched by the war with a bustling cutesy main street and the characters treat it as a major discontinuity because the people of this quaint little slice of Americana act as though there’s not a war going on….But that’s the thing, the main characters don’t give a shit about the war either. No one cares. The funniest thing about this dry tale was that entire swathes of  landlocked states like Missouri don’t give two shits that every port city is under martial law. As a Missourian who KNOWS what little treat pigs my statesmen are, there’s no way a major disruption to the supply line would pass quietly. Missouri would be a hive of Fat Houthi members who are instead trying to get the ships back to the business of filling their troughs. The people who have the most ideology in the film seem to be the odd nonaligned militia members which is fucking bananas since there are two actually organized factions in full scale war with each other and we have no idea why.  Jesse Plemons, who portrays a rose-glasses wearing  militiaman, plays at some of the only political thought in the film and it expresses itself in xenophobic wanton murder. When I say nonaligned, I mean nonaligned.  I’m not saying that I went to the bathroom, stuck my mule through a hole, and missed him explaining that he’s a deputized posse of white pride terrorists or nihilist antifa. He’s a guy who hates “non-Americans” but is NOT a member of any known faction. He just likes killing and burying people. No one spectating seems to care who wins, the soldiers participating don’t seem to know why, and all the people with any point of view are content to sow bloody turmoil around the edges. Ultimately, it’s bad world building and given that we’re just talking about America slightly divergent in timeline, the world is half-built.

Cards on the table. I’m a little piglet myself and I LOVE slop. I adore genre, I simp for camp, and I shoot ropes at shamelessness. I enjoy anything that isn’t afraid to be naked even if it is grotesque to behold, maybe even especially if it is grotesque to behold (editor’s note: Thor loves Demolition Man and considers it a 10/10 movie, why? because it knows what it is and commits to it). Watching filmmakers blow past every editing and social self-preservation instinct to deliver sloppy unfiltered humanity is the pinnacle of artistic valor. On the other hand there’s nothing that disappoints me more than gutless films. Marvel movies have this quality, so afraid of being associated with its own cloying and simple themes that it douses itself in sarcasm. Some artsy fare can be equal in its cowardice, hiding behind layers of inaccessible metaphor. I could just be stupid, but isn’t there something at least obnoxious about someone asking you to take a fucking college course to decode the messages embedded in something they’re supposed to be asking you to buy? They both reek of the type of fear that someone displays when they think they’re too cool to make stupid noises when talking to a baby, or admit a song made them cry. The fear someone might have if they think they need to constantly jockey for status, that if they are not at all times guarded by smarm, that they may be found lacking and brought low. 

So what does this have to do with Civil War? My point is that I didn’t capital H hate it. The movie’s not so pretentious and up its own butt that it’s guarded on all sides by walls of shit and ass meat, but it’s not nearly as atrocious as its premise warrants, and I mean atrocious as the highest possible praise.  The movie doesn’t really care, the characters don’t really care, so I don’t really care. What I looked forward to was a panicked delirious romp that might have said something about America. What I got was a tame contemplation on detached careerism.

If you saw the movie and disagree let me ask you this: How much cooler would Civil War have been if it were a inveterately political, dystopian, hilarious, roadtrip that melded a frantic lib-coded Escape From New York and Tommy Boy together AND it still managed to comment on the nature of war journalism? Just saying.