PERSPECTIVE

Trigger Happy

Shoot first, ask questions later

You will remember for a long time the soldier wearing red plastic sunglasses, standing on the edge of a gravel pit, and

Illustration konsume.meinsistently asking the journalists what kind of Americans they are. It is a scene of crawling tension punctuated by savage and unexpected horror. If it were in a videogame, you’d be armed with twin MP5s and encouraged to murder this guy and his friend at the earliest opportunity. But it’s not a videogame: it’s Alex Garland’s latest movie, Civil War.

This didn’t stop the usual idiots – by which I mean, with due fraternal respect to all my writerly comrades, film critics – from lining up to denounce Civil War on the basis that it was like a videogame. Even like a Call Of Duty videogame, wrote one. “It reads like a video game,” complained another who obviously learned everything they know about the medium 40 years ago, “something a teenager would be playing on his Nintendo hand set.” Bless! Critics also lambasted the movie for failing to take a clear political viewpoint (but that’s exactly what Call Of Duties do!) or explain why the US was in a civil war in the first place. Instead, the story of Kirsten Dunst and her fellow hard-bitten war photographers and journalists, plus one nervous newbie, hurtling full-speed towards the most dangerous part of the country is left, at least for these critics, bafflingly under-contextualised. If only, at the end, Dunst had unfurled a banner reading “Democrats are better than Trump!”, maybe their tiny minds would have been more gratified.