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mobocracy (869)
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Total smokeshow when she was young
Ruggedly Handsome and Charismatic — why not a bigger star?
What kind of ending was that?
Dollar store Ryan Reyonolds?
More entertaining than it had a right to be
A more ideal casting
No escape pods or shuttle?
How did they maintain order among the passengers and crew?
Why do films like this lean towards supernatural and nonsensical events?
Is just me, or did Julia Roberts look artificially aged?
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The real disappointment was that it was a pretty good modern detective noir even if it was all kind of stolen from Raymond Chandler and Chinatown.
The noir part was interesting enough that I could maybe watch another season but I don’t know how Sugar Hunts The Other Alien is really going to satisfy.
Most civil wars represent a "boiling over" of hostilities that took years, decades or even longer to reach. I don't think its necessarily a stretch for any civil war to result in a lot of brutality.
What I found less compelling was the willingness of large parts of the country to give up the luxuries and conveniences they'd still have if they weren't fighting a civil war. Modern authoritarian governments have found that decent employment and ample consumer goods largely drains away insurrectionist impulses. You might be willing to put a Trump sticker or even flag on your SuperDuty, but are you willing to give up your SuperDuty, air conditioning, etc. to fight in Trump's revolution?
So the dozens (at least!) of court challenges alleging corruption that were thrown out for lack of evidence were part of some conspiracy? The massive settlements to voting machine makers over baseless claims of corruption?
There was no corruption. Your guy lost.
I had a lot of questions about how journalism was supposed to be working in this film. As a trade and organized business, it's kind of on thin ice these days. How does being a professional journalist work during an American civil war? I kind of get the idea that the internet and communications networks would be marginal and there's probably not much distribution of newspapers or magazines, not to mention active censorship.
Who's paying them? Where does their content *go*? Who owns that SUV they drive? There was no structure, no editor or publisher.
I kind of wonder if the whole journalism thing would have been better if the journalists had been foreign -- the old guy, British, the young guy maybe German or Italian and Dunst French. The rookie girl, an American.
You're not wrong, it wasn't a good film, but I was entertained for the duration.
I thought it was all kind of thin gruel. Either the writing was just lame or they tried too hard to divorce it from current events, but who were these journalists? Random freelancers as society crumbles? Who do they work for or sell their work too? What the hell is journalism during a civil war?
I think the characters came off surprisingly thin, despite Dunst's fairly good acting.
It's something of a fair criticism to suggest that her breakout roles as an young ingenue didn't leave her a big path forward as she aged. Casting the young girl ingenue is easy in Hollywood, there's a new crop every year. Nothing about her past roles suggests what kind of character she should portray or who she is.
And like it or not, I suspect she's rejected movies which would have been a good fit for a 30-something woman because they were too sexual or required a lot of nudity. Hollywood tends to be exploitive in this department and I can see why she wouldn't want to pursue them, but rejecting 30-someting female roles because of sex or nudity ends up closing the door on a lot of narratives which are good fits for women in that age bracket.
She was briefly hospitalized for depression, and I kind of question whether her emotional temperament hasn't rubbed off on the kinds of roles she's able to get. She doesn't really seem to project a lot of joy.
I tend to agree with this, and I think most people who accuse it of bias are just projecting their own politics onto it. Which is in a way a credit to the ambiguous backdrop Garland created.
I think it would have been better, though, if Lee had been given more of a backstory if the meat of the film is largely her and the young photographer as mother/daughter like figures.
It'd grow tiresome as a long road movie with not much more than random encounters with weird people and random militia/fighters and side journeys. I think you'd also wind up exposing the underlying politics behind the civil war, which would rob it of its documentary realism if the issues were made-up/in-universe only issues OR make it too dependent on present day events.
This film did a fair job of suggesting what a civil war would look like on the ground without actually detailing what its in-universe politics are or too overtly basing them on current events, but I think it does so at a cost to much of a cohesive narrative. I don't think this could be sustained in a series.
If you asked people who were historians or political scientists what would likely cause an American civil war in the present era it would end up being things related to present day political divisions, barring some external conflict or natural disaster. It's not going to be about the designated hitter in baseball, Taco Bell vs. Chipotle, Ford vs. Chevy.
This makes it easy to project your own contemporary political conflicts into this movie, even though the movie doesn't do anything at all to explain the nature of the conflict or how Texas and California wind up in a dominant alliance against the Federal government.
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