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Civil War (2024)
Fake, gratuitous, and nonsensical
Alex Garland took a bunch of war zone nightmares from around the world, superimposed them over the U. S. landscape, and through the resulting photo-montage he drove a group of paper-thin characters.
That's it. That's the movie.
It doesn't even work as a road film. The world is thoroughly unconvincing, and the characters are sketches. Their motivations are bizarre, and their emotional states absurd due to lack of proper backstories. We don't care what happens to them. They're only there because no studio would finance a re-staging of actual CNN b-rolls from the Balkans or the Middle-East, which a lot of scenes in this feel like that was the intention. To put us inside a war zone. But we're not in a war zone. We're watching a movie while sitting on our behinds in a climate-controlled room, soda and popcorn in hand. The author seems to be aware of the problems in his piece, but since he had elected to go along with the making of this movie, instead of rewriting the script at least one more time, he resorts to cheap attempts at pulling at our heartstrings by editing emotionally-suggestive music with muted sequences of people ruminating, people crying, and people being killed, or already dead.
Of course, by now we know mister Garland's tricks. He's been using them ever since he stopped working with Danny Boyle, one of the truly great and unique directors who can tell the difference between a good script, and a bad one.
Visually the film is a regurgitation of every zombie and post-apocalyptic picture from the last 20 years. The final set piece is straight out of Call of Duty. Astounding creative hollowness.
Go watch SALVADOR for a good exploration of war journalism, and SEVEN DAYS IN MAY, a film that has both the brains and the brawn to actually instruct its viewer on what to look out for when power exceeds the boundaries of democracy.
Finding the Money (2023)
Stop writing documentaries like they're movies
It's an important, fascinating, and possibly revolutionary subject, but a maddeningly weak documentary.
Stop filming interviewees looking into camera. Stop writing documentary scripts with a pseudo-three-act, semi-thriller structure, and a catharsis at the end. Your audience is not supposed to feel uplifted by the finale, thinking they are now part of this wonderful movement to make the world a better place because they've sat on their behinds for an hour and a half, watching your documentary.
Your audience is supposed to feel intrigued, frustrated and furious! So they actually do something about the subject you want to make them care about!
It's the same cliche that permeates modern American documentary film making. First we spend an hour and twenty minutes talking about how things are messed up, only to be shown in the last 10 minutes that there is this huge and amazing movement of like-minded people doing their utmost to change things! The effect is that 9 out of 10 people who've watched such a documentary, are going to think: "Oh, dear. How terrible the world is. But I can sleep soundly knowing that somebody's already trying to fix it."
Spend less time on personal drama of the people featured in your documentary. Stop championing them as heroes, they don't need it to support their conviction. The strength of their conviction is what made you do the documentary in the first place! Unless it's the people that your documentary is about, which is not the case here, otherwise it would've had a different title. Instead, spend your 90 minutes of air time on giving us as much information as possible, and as clearly as possible. We don't need people staring us in the eye and enunciating every syllable of a five-word sentence taking 20 seconds to say it. Stop treating your audience like they're children! You expect us to understand complex matters in the world of global finance, and yet you sit us in front of people lecturing us like we're nine-year-olds in elementary school? Give us good narration writing. The documentary filmmaker is supposed to understand the subject matter well-enough to provide clear and engaging narration. The interviewees are there only to substantiate the narration! If you don't know what I'm talking about, watch some Adam Curtis.