Yeah so I saw this yesterday and it's genuinely a great, great film. I don't know why or how some of the debate around the film's promo has polarized around politics or the views of Alex Garland (which in fairness were probably taken out of context), it's a surprisingly apolitical film considering the title and the context within which it's released. It's a film with many underlying themes and points of discussion, but it's definitely not a film about the Democrats or Republicans - if that was ever in doubt.
Journalism, war reporters/photographers and the iconography of war are obviously at the forefront of it, questioning how much of war reporting has become a source of entertainment. More interestingly (for me), the film also shows how tenuous the balance within society between civilised behaviour and primitive violence is, and how that balance can quite easily be destroyed with the total collapse of our institutions. The scene with Meth Damon is in that regard the most interesting scene of the film for me. There's some food for thought, I didn't find it particularly preachy and I feel the message (or messages) are generic enough for the film to age quite well.
Having said that and having evacuated any potential confusion or whatever around the political motives of the film... It's seriously such a great piece of filmmaking. It's engrossing, it looks and feels gritty and real, it's beautifully shot and it makes a great use of music throughout the entire duration. The sound design is also very good. It's got small moments of levity, but it conveys a sense of constant threat and anguish, well carried out by the main actors (they're all great, special shoutout to my boy Wagner Moura who's so good in this), and by the tense direction - there's this random one scene where Jessie is jumping from one car to the other, you don't know exactly what's going to happen, you feel there's too much calm, too much "niceness" in the preceding couple of minutes, and you're stressed for what might happen. It earns that tension and that commitment from the viewer by carefully creating that threatening backdrop. The contrast between the extreme violence of the events taking place onscreen and the beauty of the landscapes they're driving through is also a very simple but very effective way to highlight the apocalyptic world they're now living in.
The story is tight and simple enough to keep the viewer engaged throughout, and it delivers some absolutely extraordinary scenes that will stay with me for a while:
- The encounter with Meth Damon's character (seriously, Jesse Plemons is such a good and somewhat underated actor) is amazing and is a great summary of a lot of what the film is trying to achieve, showing what would remain of a lot of the population when stripped of the conventions of society and law; it's a terrifying scene, it builds the tension brilliantly throughout those few minutes, and with very few lines and great body language, Plemons delivers a villain character that feels just a little too real and threatening
- The scene in the small town that seems (on the surface) to have been spared from the madness of the war is quite hilarious
- The assault on Washington, the closing stages of the film, is masterfully directed and choreographed; Lee's anxiety attack as they are approaching the White House is done with some subtlety by Dunst, and kinda hammers home the point of nervous exhaustion and madness of war, while her apprentice Jessie takes on the mantle and has been contaminated with the virus of obsession for the best shot, the best image, the best vantage point - the contrast between the 2, with Joel's character as a sort of archangel for both of them, while not particularly sophisticated, works well within the backdrop of extreme violence and warfare
- The final scene is great - it's the only logical conclusion to everything we've seen up until then and the film was always going to end that way, in a final shot of disappointment in our political leaders and institutions, and with this obsession for that shot being satisfied and being ultimately rather underwhelming
I really enjoyed that the film took the first 45mn/hour to set the scene and to slowly ramp up the madness, it's never boring and it's never too heavy on exposition but it makes you feel part of this new world very effectively from early on. It's a weird mix of buddy/trip movie but with a backdrop of war film, and it works very well.
It's just a very good film that you should definitely see at the cinema.