Appomattox

Film: Civil War
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library on gigantic television.

It was only a matter of time before someone decided to project a new civil war onto the United States. The level of division is maddening and disturbing—there are states I’d rather not drive through right now, and some that I have driven through recently where I wasn’t exactly worried, but where I definitely felt out of place. Alex Garland’s Civil War feels like a worst-case scenario, but also feels unfortunately real.

We don’t actually get a great deal of background on the war that is being fought. We see the unnamed president (Nick Offerman) practicing a speech that feels a bit overblown and hyperbolic, especially since we soon learn that there are multiple successionist movements of varying strength and success, and the group commonly referred to as the Western Forces are rapidly approaching Washington D.C.

J.G. Ballard's Stalker

Film: Annihilation
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on Fire!

These days, if I watch a newer horror movie, I tend to post a review of it. This is more or less self-defense; you never know when one of those movies might appear on a list that I am pursuing. I didn’t do that the first time I watched Annihilation, which is why I watched it again today. In this case, I’m not really upset by this. Annihilation is a movie that really needs to be watched at least twice to fully grok, and even with that I’m not sure I’m all the way there.

I think that this is intentional. This is not a movie that makes a lot of sense from front to back, but that’s because it is much more a movie about feel than it is about an actual plot and story. It feels alien and unknowable because it doesn’t want to be explained. It wants to be experienced and felt deep in the bones with half-sensed truths and glimpses of things out of the corner of the eye.

Catharsis?

Film: Men
Format: Blu-ray from DeKalb Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

I don’t always need to fully understand every movie I see, but I do want there to be some place where I feel like I am connected to the story and where I can understand what is happening. With Alex Garland’s Men, I don’t know that I ever really get there. This is a film that is highly allegorical and clearly allegorical, but is also pretty opaque. I’m happy to work at getting a meaning from something when I need to, but I really have to wonder if Men is worth the work I would need to put in to understand it.

The film is going to take a pretty roundabout way to tell its story, and we’re going to flashback a great deal, so I’ll smooth the path a bit here just so that what follows is a bit more linear. Harper (Jessie Buckley) has rented a house in the country in England to find a place for her to heal. Shortly before this, she had told her husband James (Paapa Essiedu) that she wanted a divorce, after which he told her that he would kill himself and it would be her fault. A fight ensued, he attacked her, and she kicked him out. Shortly thereafter, James forced his way into the apartment above and either intentionally or through misadventure, fell off the balcony to his death.

Turing Test

Film: Ex Machina
Format: Kerasotes 16 Theater.

My life rarely allows me to go to the theater. Yesterday I suddenly had a spare couple of hours and while a part of me really wanted to go see the new Avengers movie, that one will be playing for weeks. Ex Machina is likely coming to the end of its run, and it’s one I’ve wanted to see for the last couple of weeks. So that’s what I went to see. One of the great things about going to the non-tentpole movie on that movie’s opening weekend is that you get the theater pretty much to yourself. There were fewer than 10 of us, which meant I got the best seat in the house.

Ex Machina is the first directorial effort from Alex Garland, who also wrote the screenplay. Garland is no newbie to the movies, though; he wrote 28 Days Later among other screenplays. This is a film that manages to include a lot of his A-level ideas (Garland also wrote the 2/3 brilliant, 1/3 crap Sunshine), and he shows definite comfort behind the camera. It also offers a few solid thrills while touching on some high level philosophical material. In other words, it’s what we expect from the best of science fiction.