A situation close to the final one – Weekend
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A new film by Alex Garland, who has long predicted the apocalypse, is being released in Russia – without exaggeration, the most important for our turbulent era of cinema.
New York, near future. From the news reports that tired Lee (Kirsten Dunst), a famous reporter and photographer, watches late at night in her hotel room, it becomes clear that the United States is engulfed in civil war, and Washington will soon turn into a hot spot like Aleppo or Baghdad, from where she has been sending her terrible attacks for years. chronicles that taught nothing to a society consisting, alas, of “newspaper gossip swallowers.” The hotel has interruptions in electricity and water, the only guests are the press, and in the lobby there is an atmosphere of cynicism and agitation characteristic of the world’s oldest profession. Lee’s colleagues are calling sources in search of at least some inside information – what’s next, will the government withstand the separatists from Texas and California who have joined forces, or is the president ready to resign? Lee, planning to march into the heart of the country and interview the head of state, which is about to disappear from the political map, argues with her partner Joel (Wagner Moura). He persuades him to take on this risky foray the decrepit NYT columnist Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), as well as the amateur photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), who joined them immediately after the terrorist attack in Soho. The old and young have nothing to do at the end of the night, but it is with such a motley composition that they will go to witness the fall of the most powerful empire.
“Civil War” is a work to which its author, British writer, screenwriter and director Alex Garland, seems to have been working his whole life. Hostility towards humanity as a species took different forms in his work. From the relishing tourist beauty of “The Beach,” inspired by Garland’s own travels in Southeast Asia and without unnecessary sentimentality, explaining to the viewer that people are capable of causing hell even in paradise, to the claustrophobic folk horror “Male,” which parasitized Kubrick’s “The Shining,” to prove once again: hell is ourselves. And in this sense, “The Civil War”, both in structure and tone, no longer resembles the final speech of the prosecutor, but the verdict of the jury: guilty. Moreover, this verdict is not subject to appeal.
While ostensibly a road movie, Garland’s new film is actually more like a procedural. Around every turn of the highway littered with empty cars, new evidence is discovered. Be it rednecks who captured yesterday’s neighbors and posed against the backdrop of their tortured bodies in front of Lee’s impartial lens. Or the crazed soldier of fortune (a scary cameo by Jesse Plemons) who asks the journalists, before killing them, what kind of Americans they consider themselves to be. Finally, a representative of the Armed Forces (Garland’s longtime ally Karl Glusman) firing back from an unknown enemy, believes that the world has turned into a shooting gallery without a prize fund. Not to mention the residents of the states who took neutrality in the fratricidal massacre. They pretend that life goes on: they sell new collections of fashionable clothes in boutiques guarded day and night by snipers. And the main characters, as if copied from the international correspondents who accompanied Hamas on October 7, and now receive prestigious awards for picturesque photographs of corpses, demonstrate civic concern, having forgotten that information is not the highest value. Capturing someone’s death is more important to them than saving someone from death. This moral dilemma is not new, but it is increasingly disgusting.
“Civil War” can hardly be called an apocalyptic vision, because it is firmly rooted in the political agenda. The near future appears to be the end of 2024. According to forecasts, the 45th President of the United States, Donald Trump, has every chance of becoming the 47th; According to polls, his return to the White House will inevitably provoke a fatal split in American society. So in the new film, Garland is not trying to scare (although it comes out convincing), only to analyze. The question he poses is not “what if?”, but “when exactly?” Unfortunately, as a response, we are asking for a philippic against democracy that is familiar to us first-hand in Russia – after all, it is the costs of democratic processes that lead, they say, to the “yellow vests” in Paris and to the storming of the Capitol in Washington. Vox populi grows out of the noise of time, called VUCA in the academic environment. The acronym, made up of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambivalence, was adopted by academics from the military in the 1980s as the Cold War-era bipolar system began to crack at the seams. It is obvious that the new time, which is usually counted from the “end of history” (F. Fukuyama) or from the “major geopolitical catastrophe” (V. Putin), is also running out. The cascade of cataclysms of the last few years is indisputable proof of this – even Ray Bradbury, who introduced us to the “butterfly effect” in “A Sound of Thunder,” would not have figured out what follows from what. Alex Garland does not claim the laurels of Bradbury or Orwell; he is closer to the creative method of Elem Klimov – he suggests going and seeing what death looks like up close. Not on the fields of patriotic battles, but in the courtyard of one’s home. At the domestic box office, “The Civil War” was renamed “The Fall of an Empire.” Not that empire, no worries.
In theaters from April 11
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