If you were to make a list of people you’d like to see a gritty, down-to-earth, realistic, political thriller, war movie made about, Alex Garland wouldn’t be on it.Starting with his earliest filmmaking, e.g. 28 days later and Sunlight to his director effort, e.g. Ex Machina and annihilationGarland Works almost exclusively in science fiction films.So when his name appears in a movie like this civil war, A cautionary action film On political differences In the United States, this is a bit of a headache. Garland understood.
“The reason I love science fiction is because science fiction always allows for great ideas. Great ideas are not embarrassing,” Garland told io9 during a video chat last week. “They exist in forbidden planet.they exist in Star Trek. There will be clear discussions or metaphors or literary analogies or whatever happens. It’s just allowed. Sci-fi audiences are open-minded.They actually liked that… whereas if you did it in other genres, people would raise their eyebrows, in a sense, like a little arched and a little skeptical… but [Civil War], if this is too sci-fi, it will reduce the quality of reality. So it didn’t feel right. If I placed it on a distant planet, yes, maybe it would work as an analogy, but it wouldn’t have the power of such an assertion. “
So the science fiction writer puts all that aside and approaches reality in his own unique way.exist civil war, Garland presents an America that is no longer united.nation has been split into several different regions, many of which are now at war with each other. While the film clearly draws its DNA from the current political climate, it very clearly veers away from anything specific. No one is right wing, no one is left wing, everyone is, and this objectivity is not only a conscious choice in the writing, but also reflected in his protagonists.
“I wanted the film to function like a journalist, just showing a sequence of events in a considered neutral manner,” he said. “Now, that doesn’t mean it’s unbiased because a journalist covering something might feel very strongly, in fact, you can almost guarantee they will. So it just has to do with how the information is presented.”
Garland’s attempt to personify and pay homage to objective, hard-nosed journalism even carries over to the choices of journalism depicted in the film.Although modern media is dominated by video, the protagonists civil war Still a photographer, this is a special nod to the old-fashioned way of doing things that Garland wanted to pay homage to.
“When you make a film, you try to make it work on different levels, some of them quite unconscious levels,” he said. “You hope it lands in an unconscious way, but actually… [having the characters be photo journalists] Reminiscent of that old fashioned form of photojournalism. That old-fashioned form of reporting – in the 1960s and 1970s or whatever – these still photographers had cameras. So it’s like a trace memory. “
Garland hopes when civil war It turns out that for people, it will be less of a trace memory and more of an intuitive lens. But he’s not sure that will happen. “It’s a roll of the dice,” he said. “You throw it into a polarized world, and if you don’t preach to a choir that wants to be preached to, then they’re going to be angry. Because that’s the counter. You want to hear your own biases reflected back on you.”
For someone who regularly writes about zombies, spaceships, artificial intelligence, and alternate dimensions, this doesn’t seem to be a reflection of him at all. Even so.
civil war Opens Friday. We’ll have more information from Garland later this week.
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