If you use IMDB much (the International Move Data Base) you’ll be invited to create lists of which movies you want to keep track. Lists like classic indie syfy, Jewish starlets, or films with little people.
A list one could create would be movies with dumb set ups. The Harry Potter franchise, for example, would not exist save for the wizarding world’s weird form of magical gun control - it is forbidden to use the killing curse (“avada kavadra!”). The result is only villains use it. If the heroes used it too they could eliminate the villains in chapter 1 of every book. Or in the current Netflix hit, The Three Body Problem, a race of aliens on a 400 light year journey to settle on earth start out friendly and then decide that humans are bugs when a human communicating with them explains that humans lie. But the aliens use their advanced technology to deceive humans, interfering with particle collider experiment results to make it seem to terrestrial physicists that their human science no longer explains physical laws of the universe.
The new movie Civil War, about an American civil war resulting from political polarization, has the same basic stupidity problem. The movie follows a press vehicle traveling from New York to DC, through war zones, to be the first to record the fall of the current American government, presided over by a POTUS played by Nick Offerman. (Fields, farms, and forests in Georgia, whose state government film promotion bureau worked heavily with the producers, “play” rural Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Virginia.) Kirsten Dunst plays a world renowned war photographer, “Lee Smith,” who tells us she was taking photos of foreign wars for Americans so we would never let conflicts get this bad back home. Traveling with her own reporter partner (a hot but disturbingly unclean and sexually ambiguous Wagner Mauro), a rival New York Times reporter, and a baby photojournalist (played by Cailee Spaeny).
Dunst has had star turns as a child vampire, a head cheerleader, and Spiderman’s girlfriend. Now she gets to be a mother, or at least a maternal figure - though it is a little unclear how much Spaeny’s character’s affection is daughterly, hero worship, or a baby dyke crush. Dunst loans Spaeny an orange reflective vest identifying her as press and lectures her about getting a kevlar jacket and a helmet. The whole crew then do wear, briefly, both kevlar and helmets. But of course having your face and head covered is not cinematic, so the bullet proof gear disappear quickly in the film. By the end only a fraction of the characters have survived. (And in the end we see that this is really a remake of All About Eve, relocated from Broadway to a civil war.)
Before Civil War was in theaters, there was commentary about what it was going to be. The lovely and talented conservative culture critic Peachy Keenan warned that it would be another anti-Trump screed, retweeting a trade journal headline about how the film showed “journalists saving America,” with Keenan observing that it was a female journalist. But in the movie the journalists are moronic and get themselves abducted and killed. Their “life work” of warning Americans by sending back photos from war zones has had no effect.
And the characters themselves don’t fit what we all assumed would be the narrative of the movie. When captured, Nick Offerman’s President has nothing Trumpian to say when he’s asked for a quote by one of the journos. He just asks for mercy in an unmemorable turn of phrase that sounded a lot more like a mumbling Joe Biden. Despite winning at the box office, Civil War is now being denounced by “progressive” reviewers, like leftist Andre Hereford at the gay Metroweekly: “cops out by remaining too vague in the details…Civil War opts instead for a both-sides, either-side, who-cares-which-side point of view that sidesteps ideology almost entire.” One wonders if its good box office is either because it can please all audience members of any ideology - or if its fans take it to be the ultimate deposition of our current failed president.
This was published earlier this week at SpliceToday.