Review: "Civil War Is the Loveliest Monument to Both-Sides Nonsense Yet"

The movie has something called "the ANTIFA Massacre".

Civil War Is the Loveliest Monument to Both-Sides Nonsense Yet - pastemagazine.com

Tell my wife I said "Hello."
By Kenneth Lowe | April 15, 2024 | 10:04am

Do you remember the beginning of Red Dawn? I do. One of the stupidest movies with one of the most odiously jingoistic and patriarchal underlying worldviews still has an advantage on Alex Garland's Civil War, by virtue of its howler of an opening chyron.

Red Dawn (1984) - Opening Credits - YouTube

Say what you will about Red Dawn, a movie dumber, perhaps, than Orson Scott Card's writing on this very subject: It knows what side it is on. This is more than you can say for Civil War, the confused but pretty ode to Old School War Journalism that seems to understand neither war nor journalism. I write about film a lot, so I can say this is not a bad film. I also was a nobody Midwestern journalist from 2008-2013, a time that further entrenched the actual divisions between actual Americans even as it destroyed the sorts of institutions I worked for that are supposed to be as objective as Civil War is trying to be. So I can also say that Civil War is fucking stupid.

I really only need one example to prove this. It's somewhere in the second reel, when a green photographer (for which outlet is she reporting?) narrates the main character's own resume to her—one item is that she got photos of "the ANTIFA Massacre." Writer/director Alex Garland somehow wrote this in a script and, presumably, never had anybody punch it up.

I got told over and over again while I was growing up that we were in the Information Age, in much the same way my parents grew up in the Space Age. We must be past it now and fully into the Misinformation Age if nonsense like this makes it into a movie that got cut and printed, where Kirsten Dunst had to be in a scene with a line like that. Nobody comes to Paste for breaking news about protests or riots or politics, but just because you should always speak the truth when you have somebody's attention, here goes: There is no "Antifa." It is not an extant entity. It is a broad description of personal ideology, meant to indicate someone is against fascism, which is an actual political stance that exists in the world.

The line of dialogue would make as much sense if it were "the Underhand Toilet Paper Roll Massacre," if we're looking for classifications about which people may stridently disagree yet which have no treasurer or petitions for peace talks with any government. Captain America: The Winter Soldier at least namechecked the ELN, an actual Colombian left-wing outfit, when it wanted to give Robert Redford's character some grit.