Tell me you’re making a political movie without telling me you’re making a political war movie without telling me you’re making a political war movie. Civil War, Alex Garland’s (Annihilation, Ex Machina) newest film in which The United States has become even more divided and intense than at the time of its 2024 release, serves as an ominous narrative about the potential future of our country. While it’s sure to be divisive, Garland is purposeful in not picking a side while being vague about the two sides. Outside of Dune 2, Civil War is the film that received the most buzz after the first four months of the year. Rightfully so.
Category Archives: Alex Garland
Annihilation (2018)
It took me two watches, some 12 months apart from one another, for me to be able to say emphatically that Alex Garland’s (Ex Machina) Annihilation isn’t a great movie. While I completely appreciate its ingenuity and ambition, the overall execution, delivery, and continuity could not be overlooked. For as much as I completely was in awe of Garland’s 2015 directorial debut Ex Machina, I was even more disappointed with Annihilation, a movie for me that came and went as it felt, broke its own rules, left me bored at times and hoping for more, while knowing it was never going quite to deliver. With a critics’ score of 88%, but an audience score of just 66%, I am comfortable saying that, after watching it twice, maybe there was some artistry that I was missing that made this movie so likable by those who review for a living. I couldn’t help but be taken out of critic mode and, even after taking off that hat, couldn’t get behind Annihilation to come close to recommending it.
Ex Machina (2015)
Sometimes when you see a movie that you know nothing about, you are treated with an unknown little treat…a film that will stick with you forever. Ex Machina is that movie this year. My comparison here is to the Brad Pitt/Morgan Freeman gem Seven. It was a movie in which I knew nothing. I had only heard that it was a movie I must see through word of mouth. Seven probably has a place forever reserved in my all-time top 25. That’s how good it was. But I think a lot of this initially high rating was because of how in awe of it I was when I saw it in a such a small, rickety stage theater converted to a movie theater in Lexington, VA, in the fall of 1997. Now, Ex Machina is not in the class of Seven. But like Seven, it is a gripping, carefully scripted movie, and one that will stay in your head for a very long time after its viewing. Ex Machina will be hard to beat for the best movie of the first half of 2015.
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