Late to the party but I also enjoyed this movie much more than I expected. I can understand why some critics were disappointed, given Garland's fairly baffling comments - and a title/marketing that in hindsight are almost entirely misleading. I think your Max Read on it (sorry) as an Iraq movie set on the US East Coast is spot on; the ci…
Late to the party but I also enjoyed this movie much more than I expected. I can understand why some critics were disappointed, given Garland's fairly baffling comments - and a title/marketing that in hindsight are almost entirely misleading. I think your Max Read on it (sorry) as an Iraq movie set on the US East Coast is spot on; the civil war is a narrative conceit to make it immediate and affecting to American audiences. It's set in Pennsylvania and DC the same way a Shakespeare play is set in Verona or Denmark.
One thing I haven't seen anyone mention yet is the film's use of still photos, which I think is really the key to understanding it. Of the few glimpses we get of the American public, two characters mention their parents are just ignoring the civil war, and the only one we actually meet outside of a war zone is very deliberately not paying attention (which clearly shakes Wagner Moura's character). When Moura finally gets his quote at the end, there's no triumph or sense that journalism has won; the feeling that our 'heroes' are little more than vultures is never fully dispelled. The question then becomes: is making this record of atrocity, unwanted and impotent as it is, worth shutting off the human part of you that should recoil from it? We never see the public's reaction, if any - only the photos, incongruously black and white as if already buried in the pages of a high school textbook.
Late to the party but I also enjoyed this movie much more than I expected. I can understand why some critics were disappointed, given Garland's fairly baffling comments - and a title/marketing that in hindsight are almost entirely misleading. I think your Max Read on it (sorry) as an Iraq movie set on the US East Coast is spot on; the civil war is a narrative conceit to make it immediate and affecting to American audiences. It's set in Pennsylvania and DC the same way a Shakespeare play is set in Verona or Denmark.
One thing I haven't seen anyone mention yet is the film's use of still photos, which I think is really the key to understanding it. Of the few glimpses we get of the American public, two characters mention their parents are just ignoring the civil war, and the only one we actually meet outside of a war zone is very deliberately not paying attention (which clearly shakes Wagner Moura's character). When Moura finally gets his quote at the end, there's no triumph or sense that journalism has won; the feeling that our 'heroes' are little more than vultures is never fully dispelled. The question then becomes: is making this record of atrocity, unwanted and impotent as it is, worth shutting off the human part of you that should recoil from it? We never see the public's reaction, if any - only the photos, incongruously black and white as if already buried in the pages of a high school textbook.