Garland's decision to leave the politics of this war obscure is both commercially and politically shrewd, and highly effective. It means that American viewers of Right, Centre or Left conviction, or none at all, can watch it as an antiwar film whose horrifying events could as well be happening in the Ukraine or Gaza. It also subverts our own class stereotypes outside of the USA -- are those violent characters who look like Jan 6th Trump supporters on the East or the West side? Once the soldiers take charge, politics evaporate.
Garland has announced that he's retiring from directing after this movie, which is a pity since for me he's filled a movie space that Spielberg vacated due to increasing sentimentality. Garland's 'Ex Machina' is the most caustic depiction of AI and Silicon Valley megalomania I've seen, and was made several years before anyone had even heard of GPT. His 'Annihilation' is just plain nuts, but it's the most unsettling 'horror' film I've seen, and I don't even like horror films.
Very similar reaction on my part. Insofar as there is any reference to the political background the vague notion of a Texas/California alliance - hence the 'two-star' union flag of the 'western forces' - suggests rather unlikely bed fellows and certainly not a clear far right rebellion
ReplyDeleteStuck out here in the sticks and confined to barracks for the last couple of months due to shitty health, I haven't yet seen it but from what I've read, and here confirmed by Dick, is that in the polarised world we're living in, it's the largely ghastly outcomes we're fixated with rather than the fundamental reasons. And that's probably because the horses have bolted the stables and it's too late to apply any workable remedies even if there was the will to do so.
ReplyDeleteHaven't seen it but there would appear to be echos with Paul Lynch's Booker winner Prophet Song which filled me with some dread because of the very realistic gradual escalation - eventually there is no clear distinction between the warring sides, though it seems to have all begun with a right wing swoop of arrests on supposedly leftish folk like union representatives, who then 'disappear'. A coup. I think, as Lynch recognises, the forces of civil war have already been released, just waiting for the moment, torturers ready. Politics is irrelevant because the forces have a deterministic logic. Warmongering rhetoric is all the rage and systematic lethal violence has become almost blase. I see a coup against a radical government in the UK as almost inevitable. No problem with Starmer then. Except those eager for autocratic power at some point stop at nothing.
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