Review of the film “Empire Falls” by Alex Garland

Alex Garland’s Civil War, a social utopia about civil war-torn America in the near future, is being released. I found the director’s picture of a possible political apocalypse superficial and unconvincing Julia Shagelman.

It would seem that the last thing the world, already tormented by armed conflicts in different geographical locations, needs now is a movie about yet another war, only a fictitious one, where even real documentarians do not have time to record what is happening. At the same time, while the United States is still more divided than ever, tensions are rising due to the upcoming presidential elections: cynical as it may sound, this in some sense creates a free advertising campaign for the film, which is originally called “The Civil War”, and his poster features the torch of the Statue of Liberty, turned into a sniper platform. What will happen if the wrong person is elected president and political disputes from social networks spill out onto the streets? It’s especially interesting to look at this from abroad, but from the inside, in theory, it should be instructive.

Alex Garland, who directed his fourth (and, perhaps, if you believe his recent interviews, last) full-length film, like the previous ones, from his own script, does not waste time on introductions and plunges viewers directly into the pre-final stage of a war that has been going on for some time. The President (Nick Offerman) from Washington addresses the nation: everything is going according to plan, government troops have crushed the forces of the Western Alliance, victory is near. These words are met with a skeptical chuckle from photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst), who is watching the performance on TV in her New York hotel room. A quick montage shows that Lee has become famous for her photographs from a variety of hot spots, and if anyone doesn’t understand that her name is a reference to the legendary Lee Miller, then this will later be mentioned in dialogue with her aspiring colleague and fan Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). Together they find themselves right at the site of another terrorist attack, which in this gloomy reality seems to have become almost routine.

Lee believes that the president, despite optimistic statements, will not last long in office, and this opinion is shared by Joel (Wagner Moura) from Reuters, who invites her to rush to Washington and take the last interview with the guarantor who no longer guarantees anything. The idea is, of course, risky, but journalistic passion cannot be overcome. Even more dangerous is the idea of ​​taking with you the completely green Jessie and, on the contrary, the elderly and unable to run Sammy (Stephen Henderson) from “what remains of the New York Times,” but if you had persuaded Lee Joel to get them out of the car, there would have been no film . So the four of them take the long, circuitous route through Pennsylvania and Virginia to DC.

The Western Alliance, it turns out, is the combined forces of California and Texas who declared war on Washington when the president illegally served a third term. In what political universe did California liberals with vegan smoothies at the ready manage to find something in common with Texas conservatives who revere the Second Amendment more than the Bible, and what happened to Arizona and New Mexico, which separate them purely geographically (there are only two stars on the Alliance flag), in the film not told. Perhaps for the Briton Garland all this is one big and still very wild West. It is also possible that it is not worth demanding specifics from a fantastic assumption, because the authors do not even dare to say which party the bad usurper president belongs to. Or they don’t want to, rightly believing that it is possible to collect twice as much money at the box office from both Republicans and Democrats as from just one of them.

However, this vagueness of detail ends up turning Lee and company’s trip into a collection of very commonplaces. Of course, they will meet rednecks stunned by impunity with guns, people in camouflage shooting at each other, who have long forgotten what exactly they did not divide, white representatives of the middle class, pretending that nothing is happening – a worse threat to democracy, of course , does not exist, and is a completely unhinged psychopath, reveling in bloody chaos (this short appearance by Jesse Plemons is perhaps the best thing in the film).

The background for all this could just as easily be, for example, a zombie apocalypse – and it has already been in thousands of films and TV series. But then we would have to abandon the clickbait title, critics would not see parallels on the screen, and the actors would not be able to intelligently argue on the red carpet that war turns out to be bad. And you can’t argue: war is bad, bombs kill, man is a wolf to man, some journalists, in pursuit of sensation, forget about empathy, and horses eat oats and hay. But any news report on an ordinary Tuesday is much worse than anything director Garland could come up with.