Movie Review: Civil War

 

Michael's Movie Grade: F

An incredibly overrated movie. 

A film about a major modern civil war sweeping across the U.S. should either be a fun popcorn movie or an intelligent political commentary. This film is neither. Civil War takes itself too seriously to ever be anything that is even remotely entertaining. On the other hand, it plays things much too safe to really say anything at all. This movie seems too afraid to say anything even remotely controversial. Because of this you get the same extremely basic messages about war, politics and journalism that you have heard in a million other movies. The movie says absolutely nothing that anyone watching it has never heard before. The film gets increasingly dark and unpleasant as it goes along. However, since there is no real point to the story, this is simply unpleasant and grim to be unpleasant and grim. It makes the movie simply a chore to watch and offers no reward to the audience who sits through these hard to watch scenes. 

A major missed opportunity comes from the characters being incredibly bland and lacking any personalities. This takes away what easily been the most interesting part of the whole film. The story follows a group of war journalists, who are driven to follow these stories regardless of how dangerous the task is or how horrific the world they see is. This could have been a great opportunity to look into just what drives a person to do something like this. Yet we never really get to know who any of these characters really are or what exactly makes them so driven. For a film that wants so badly to feel real, the characters don't feel like real people for even a second. 

This movie strives for realism but while it may visually look realistic, the storyline is far from believable. It is incredibly far-fetched much of the time and many story points make one scratch their heads. From the bizarreness of California and Texas being two states that are involved in the secession from the U.S. (could they have picked two states that are more politically different) to the over-the-top unintentional silliness to many of the action scenes to the unintentional corniness of the final line, there is little here that feels real at all.

I find it hard to believe that the critics are being so kind to this film and have to wonder if they saw a different movie than I did. This is painful to watch.