CIVIL WAR

Directing: A-
Acting: B+
Writing: C
Cinematography: A-
Editing: B
Special Effects: B+

A movie about a modern American civil war should have a clear point of view, and it should have balls. Alex Garand’s Civil War has neither. It should be noted: the premise alone does not qualify.

I’m not even saying this movie has to make explicit what the political issues were across the country that resulted in armed forces in many states turned secessionists. Garland’s choice to avoid that kind of specificity is actually one of his smart ones. That does not, however, preclude a point of view, something beyond vague notions of “war is bad” or “journalists are soulless.” And notwithstanding the empty complaints among people on the right who clearly haven’t even watched this movie, Civil War really offers very little, story-wise, to hold onto. It’s just a road trip through war-torn country that happens to be America, with some incredibly well directed, gripping, beautifully shot battle sequences.

Even the comparisons of this movie’s American President (Nick Offerman, seen onscreen far less than expected) to President Trump are exaggerated. We know this president is in his third term, that he has ordered air strikes on American citizens (but not how or why), and we know that unlikely groups of people are allied against him. He’s never characterized as a buffoon, or of particularly low intelligence. And yet, the “Western Forces” of California and Texas are allied against him—something that has caused a great amount of chatter among people, on all sides of the political spectrum, as straining plausibility. My stance on this is that far weirder things have happened in times of war, which makes strange bedfellows. Besides, a line early in the film has really stuck with me: “When D.C. falls, they’ll turn on each other.” Indeed, once a common enemy is pushed aside, people previously on the same side are free to find fault with each other.

There are other references to aligned states in throwaway lines in Civil War, such as “The Florida Alliance,” or Midwestern states still loyal to the U.S. government, where small-town residents live their daily lives pretending like none of this is happening. Our protagonist, hardened photojournalist Lee Miller (Kirsten Dunst, truly fantastic) has parents in Colorado doing exactly this. Her very young acolyte photojournalist, Jessie (Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny, actually 23 years old during production and playing 23, though she barely looks even 18), has parents in Missouri doing the same.

A major problem I have with Civil War is the same problem I have with many dystopian visions of a near future: its refusal to acknowledge race. Does anybody really think there would be a second civil war in the United States and race would have no relevance? There’s a very tense sequence in which Jesse Plemons plays a blithely murderous militia man, and the scene uses two men of Asian descent to illustrate his pointed xenophobia. This is in the same neigborhood as racism, of course, but it’s still distinct from it. But Alex Garland just isn’t interested in going that step further.

This is the fundamental problem with Civil War, which is the cinematic equivalent of a product with claims of nutrition when it actually has none. And don’t get me wrong, there is still a lot to recommend Civil War, which is genuinely gripping from start to finish. But, much like the 2006 film Children of Men, it has too many “why” questions it refuses to answer while it wows us exceptional production. (Children of Men, at least, is far more impressive on a technical and production level, creating a world that feels far more lived in, if just as implausible.)

It’s the ideas themselves that are the problem—or, the lack thereof. This is the kind of movie that you really get into while it’s happening, and can only leave saying it was great if you don’t think too hard about it. Garland, however, is challenging us to think about it, without fleshing out what it’s trying to say. There’s certainly the idea that there are not truly “good guys” in active warfare, and we are never given a side to root for—something these journalists don’t even want, as they pride themselves on supposed objectivity.

And yet, even with journalism being looked at through by far the most critical lense in this film, even that winds up muddled in presentation. Too many of the details make too little sense. “They shoot journalists on sight in the capitol,” we are told early on. Somehow, the armed forces closing in on the capitol welcome press with open arms, no questions asked. Come on, really? And this is hardly a new observation: far too few of the journalists in this film are seen taking video (in fact, I think we see only one or two doing so, and only with a professional news camera—literally not one single character is seen taking video on their smartphone). Lee and Jessie engage with still photography exclusively, albeit with many of the still shots they take being equal parts beautiful and horrifying.

A lot of Civil War is gorgeously shot, which is part of the deeply misleading journey it takes us on. All the plot connections are shaky at best, making this a kind of low-rent Apocalypse Now, even with its often beautiful imagery. I just watched this movie feeling a bit lost as to the actual stakes, and what I was supposed to take away from it. And what I took away from it was its top-notch cinematography, direction, and acting, particularly on the part of Dunst, who has never been better. But what is the whole thing that these parts are coming together to make? Yet another in a long line of supposedly anti-war movies that wow us with its rendering of war, in this case with nothing of any real substance to say.

The Expendables: four journalists face their various fates.

Overall: B

DEVOTION

Directing: A-
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: A-

Does a movie have to be profound to be great? This is a relevant question, easy to forget, at least for me, where I tend to approach how I regard a movie from the bottom up: its baseline is far from greatness, which is what it has to prove. I had this experience with the 2004 film Sideways, which didn’t exactly blow me away, but when I realized I could think of nothing wrong with it, I still gave it a solid A. I still stand by that.

Devotion is a wildly different film, and yet I had a similar experience with it. The crticial consensus seems to be definitively mixed, and I went to see it mostly just because I love going to see the movies and I try to see everything I even might enjoy, and I expected to like it fine. And then, it significantly exceeded my expectations.

It strikes me as relevant that the “critical consensus” is still majority-White, and that remains a salient fact. I wish it were easier to seek out critical voices from the same marginalized groups represented in a given film—which is, admittedly, a flimsy and arguably lazy thing for me to say. If it’s really that important to me, I should dig into some research and start bookmarking the websites of relevant reviewers whose opinions I respect.

It should also be noted, however, that the audience score at rottentomatoes.com is 92%, a site notorious for racist user-review bombing, and earned an audience rating of A- according to CinemaScore. I have no idea what the demographic makeup is of these groups, but that strikes me as less relevant; in any case, I am far more aligned with audiences than with critics on this one. I thoroughly enjoyed this movie.

So why, then, is it underperforming so dramatically? Although it feels respectable for it to be ranked #4 at the box office over this weekend, it has earned all of $9 million so far, which is literally a tenth of its budget. This movie deserves better than that.

And in a season of gratitude, I must say: thank heavens for that $90 million budget, which director J.D. Dillard used to maximum effect. It would be easy to compare this film to this year’s other aviator movie, box office juggernaut Top Gun Maverick, which is indisputably far more impressive on a technical level, and earned every penny of its earnings on its own terms. Incidentally, the trailer for Devotion, quite understandably, ran before showings of Top Gun Maverick, which means everyone and their mother saw the trailer to this movie. Maybe people think just one aviator movie was enough for this year? Well, if you bother to see Devotion you’ll discover such an assumption to be incorrect. Because not only does Devotion also justify itself on its own terms, it also features its own impressive fighter pilot flight sequences, with its own impressively integrated special effects—so impressive, in fact, that you hardly notice there are any visual effects at all. People forget that sometimes that’s exactly what makes them impressive, particularly when the use of effects serve only to move the story forward.

I am convinced audiences would be won over by Devotion if they just gave it a chance. This may be a conventionally paced “inspired by a true story” quasi-biopic, but the way I see it, that is very much its strength. This is about the bond formed between Jesse and Tom, two aviators during the Korean War, one of them Black and one of them White, and when it comes to depictions of Jesse’s challenges and Tom’s white guilt, between Jesse’s guarded emotional defenses and Tom’s willingness to listen when it’s most critical, this is the rare movie that does these things right.

Tom is played by Glen Powell, who incidentally also played Hangman in Top Gun Maverick, and his casting represents the “blandly handsome White guy” as much as anyone could. And that’s fine, because Jesse is played by the singularly talented Jonathan Majors, who popped in a breakout role in The Last Black Man In San Francisco, and later carried the HBO series Lovecraft Country—he was also recently introduced as the latest Marvel ultra-villain in the Disney+ series Loki. He is excellent in Devotion, proving himself a worthy leading man who, again, deserves more eyes on his performances than he’s getting.

All of Devotion is set in 1950, just five years after the end of the second World War and thus the same amount of time into the Cold War; the settings, always on or near a Navy aircraft carrier, move from Rhode Island to France to Korea. Jesse has a wife and daughter back home (Christina Jackson is also great as wife Daisy), scared and hopeful as this group of aviators is deployed to Korea at the start of that war, which doesn’t even happen until roughly the third act. And this is where the more thrilling flight sequences occur, which I must stress are worth the wait. There are POV shots from cockpits showing Chinese soldiers scattering across snowy forest hillsides that look very real, and whether there is any CG element to this or it was done with a large number of extras, either way it is visually impressive.

Perhaps most importantly, Devotion is about the bond of friendship, depicted with only just the right amount of sentimentality, and not about spectacle, although it has some of that too. These movies are also worth seeing, and still better experienced in a movie theater. By the end, you might just be weeping—I was—because of the attention to detail, not just in its technical achievements but in the representation of its relationships. This is the kind of movie I often find myself waiting and longing for, in which the director gives the story time to breathe. You really come to know these characters, and thus deeply care about them. And in the end, I left the theater caring about them far more than expected from what clearly looks to many to be a conventional film just like many others. The truth is, Devotion is in a class of its own.

Exceeds expectations even when you already expect it to be good.

Overall: A-

GREYHOUND

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: B
Cinematography: B+
Editing: B+
Special Effects: B+

Greyhound brings to mind the 2006 Paul Greengrass film United 93: packed with real-time procedure, a little short on story development. In the case of both films, it really just means it works for a particular type of viewer. It’s just not for everyone.

Would I have gone to see Greyhound were it playing in theaters? Probably; although it’s moderately lacking in many regards, it has a degree of visual detail that would best be seen on a big screen. Or, I suppose, I should just get myself a truly large-screen TV screen one of these days. This film is now available streaming on Apple TV+, where I watched it on my 32” screen.

Probably 95% of 91-minute run time takes place on the open ocean of the Atlantic, the Greyhound of the title being the ship captained by Krause (Tom Hanks), leading an Allied convoy on his first-ever crossing, in early 1942. All of them are being stocked by a German submarine wolf pack, one of them occasionally getting onto their intercom to taunt them, and all of the strategic moves among the convoy are made at Krause’s direction. Some have tragic consequences; some are near misses; some are skilled successes.

And there’s a lot of said direction. The script is written by Tom Hanks himself (his third, after That Thing You Do and Larry Crowne, so this marks a bit of a departure) and based on the 1955 novel The Good Shepherd by C.S. Forester. Clearly Hanks has a longstanding interest in World War II, and he must be going for authenticity when he packs what must be more than half the dialog with straight-up repetition: Krause gives an order; the person taking them repeats it back. That person passes along said order; another person repeats it back. I’ve never seen a movie with so many of its lines repeated verbatim in quick succession.

The only back story we get on Krause is the woman he left back home (Elisabeth Shue), whom he asked to come away with her the previous december. There’s a brief scene of this single encounter near the beginning of the film, with quick flashbacks sprinkled through the rest of the movie. We know nothing more about Krause, apart from when we learn of his inexperience; we know even less about the woman. The focus of this film is otherwise entirely on the sea battles and chases between Allied navy ships and German submarines.

To director Aaron Schneider’s credit, these battles are very well staged, and often very well shot. One memorable visual entais a camera sweep from the sea up through the clouds, flashes from bombs still visible beneath them, and the aurora borealis above them. Still, this is also similar to Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk (2017), in that it’s visually impressive but gives us virtually nothing in terms of its characters. At least Dunkirk was a technical marvel; to be honest, occasionally Greyhound shows its seams. Some of its CGI augmentation is fairly obvious.

That doesn’t lessen its degree of engagement, though. Greyhound is fundamentally an action movie; it’s just old-school serious in tone, no witty quips by action heroes. Decisions have consequences, often fatal on a grand scale. Oddly, Hanks’s script doesn’t give himself much to chew on as an actor, as all the suspense and drama here is procedural, only emotional in very subtle ways. He won’t be getting an Oscar nomination for this one. And that’s okay; he has enough of them.

Still, Greyhound is a suitable movie for fans of either Tom Hanks or World War II films, or particularly, both. Even for the casual viewer (that’s me!), it commands attention.

Look out!

Overall: B

LAST FLAG FLYING

Directing: B+
Acting: A-
Writing: B+
Cinematography: B
Editing: B+

Here is a movie I would not normally respond to, and to be honest, I have mixed feelings about how well I did respond to it. It works quite well as a movie for someone with zero background and nearly zero knowledge of military culture and protocol; I can't help but wonder how actual veterans I know would respond to it. How authentic is it, really, I wonder? I literally have no idea. It seems important to admit that up front. This is the kind of detail that can make or break a movie for people who have gone through the same kinds of things these guys went through.

That said, Last Flag Flying -- with its annoyingly tongue-twisty title -- may be a pretty male-centric movie, of which there is still no shortage, but when it comes to male relationships, and particularly friendship and loyalty among straight men, it really stands out. I'm a gay man who exists worlds apart from any character in this movie, and still I responded to it. This movie made me laugh, I cried just a little bit, it moved me.

The key there is Richard Linklater, the brilliant director and writer behind such films as Boyhood and Before Midnight. His name alone is what, like me, might attract viewers to a story like this when it could have been easily overlooked as a film by most other directors. Linklater has a knack for getting to the heart of characters; he specializes in dialogue, and doesn't distract with pointless action or snappy editing.

And the three main characters in Last Flag Flying are multi-dimensional, fully formed -- I may not know how authentic all the military content is, but these three certainly come across as authentic people. Steve Carell continues his work as an underrated actor of subtle precision as Larry "Doc" Shepherd, the Vietnam veteran whose son has just died in Iraq just two days before the story begins.

Doc finds two Vietnam War-era buddies not seen in decades, guys who could not be more different from him or from each other, but who were all bonded by the experience of serving in the war. Sal Nealon (Bryan Cranston, only slightly over-the-top in obnoxiousness) is an alcoholic owner of a run-down bar; Reverend Richard Mueller (Lawrence Fishburne, suitably dignified most of the time) is now sober and working as the pastor of a church. Doc, recently widowed only months before the death of his son, is quiet and somber in his grief. His way to deal with it is to look up Sal and Richard and go to them to ask that they come with him to pick up his son's body.

Linklater infuses a surprising amount of humor into this otherwise downer of a story, which happens organically and is a welcome element. All three of these men come across as flawed people simply doing the best with what they have to work with.

The setting is 2003, giving Linklater a chance to draw plenty of comparisons between the pointlessness and wastefulness of both the Vietnam and the Iraq Wars. This plays pretty well and never feels too forced; however, he does rely a little too heavily on the supposed newfangled-ness of things like The Internet and mobile phones. 2003 may have been fourteen years ago, but these things had been pretty common for several years even then. It could be argued, perhaps, that the perceptions of much older men at the time changes things -- but one would think even someone their age in 2003 would not have been that surprised that they could be tracked down using the Internet.

So: Last Flag Flying lacks the seamlessness of some of Richard Linklater's other more recent output, but it's far from fatally flawed. This is a movie really worth a look, and I'm saying this as someone who typically has zero interest in a movie like this. The actors truly sell their characters, and make for a couple of hours with them very well spent.

This movie is way more fun than this photo makes it look, I swear!

Overall: B+

DUNKIRK

Directing: B
Acting: B
Writing: C+
Cinematography: B+
Editing: A-

Dunkirk is fine.

Judging by the critical reception, though, you'd expect it to be extraordinary. By far the best-reviewed wide-release movie of the year so far, it has a score of 92% at Rotten Tomatoes, and an even higher score (which is very unusual) of 94 at MetaCritic. It seems like everyone and their mother likes this movie, and the few outliers are expected to be mere contrarians.

I'm not quite a contrarian: there is much to like about this movie. I'm just not going to tell you it's great. I'm not even going to tell you there's any pressing need for you to pay for a ticket to see it in the theatre. Dunkirk is not offered in 3D -- thankfully -- but it is available at IMAX theatres, which comes with its own price premiums, and I can tell you there is no need to waste money on that.

If by chance you don't know, Dunkirk is the name of the beach where over 300,000 Allied soldiers were evacuated from the north of France in 1940. This was a year and a half before the U.S. could be bothered to get involved in World War II thanks to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor. The stories yet to be told about the second World War remain vast, but writer-director Christopher Nolan takes a comparatively micro view of this single military operation.

Much has been made of how much tension there is in Dunkirk, but the thing is, that's nearly all its got. Its greatest asset, which is mostly what creates the tension, is in its editing. In true Nolan style, a while into the film, you realize you're seeing different plot puzzle pieces fit together. The story's focus is four-pronged: three different boats or ships, and a couple of fighter planes, and how they all eventually intersect. There is indeed something undeniably satisfying about how all of these things eventually fit together.

Being rated PG-13, though, there's a certain lack of gritty realism. This, combined with a months-long marketing campaign positioning Dunkirk in a slightly misleading way as a Summer Event Movie, made me expect something a little more action-oriented, with Nolan's involvement creating an added expectation of cinematic artfulness. There are elements of both, but Nolan never quite goes the distance on either front.

There's plenty of pointed chaos, to be sure. But there's something essential missing from Dunkirk, and it is character development. It has almost none. This is more of a portrait of this evacuation, focusing on just a few people, but the camera simply follows them around through harrowing situations more than it picks up on anything in the way of individual conflicts. There's a certain emotional heft a movie like this should have, and Dunkirk lacks it.

It's certainly gripping, though. Although it barely falls short of qualifying as an action movie, there's plenty of action in it. The cast includes a couple of Nolan regulars: Tom Hardy as one of the fighter pilots; Cillian Murphy as a shell shocked soldier rescued from a capsized boat. It also features Kenneth Branagh and James D'Arcy as officers who do little more than walk around staring at everything happening on the beach. And perhaps most famously, Harry Styles is featured among the group of young soldiers just desperately trying to find their way onto one of the boats.

None of them talk much. The actor who gets the most screen time, Mark Rylance as the civilian boat captain taking his teenage son and young friend out to take part in the evacuation, also gets the most lines, and even that's not a whole lot. For the most part, it's boats and planes, bombs and explosions, capsizing and nose diving, all set to a score that clearly evokes a ticking clock.

There's a strange dichotomy to Dunkirk. It's impossible to be bored watching this movie, but it's also impossible to think of it as a truly accurate portrayal of what went on in the real-life event. It's still very much a Hollywood movie, clever in subtle ways but pointedly clever nonetheless. Unlike, say, the truly graphic extended opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan, it has less to say about the horrors of war than about how a director with a certain amount of power can turn war into ultimately inconsequential art. Because realistically, years from now, while people will still be talking about the best war movies ever made, no one will still be talking about Dunkirk.

Overall: B