The trailers for this movie promised a gritty war film, inferring there'd be some intelligent, contemporary study of how a stable democracy could descend into authoritarianism and violent division. Nah, this isn't that. Not at all.
What we get instead was a bewildering road trip movie. A handful of supposedly veteran war journalists blunder across the land encountering a series of utterly predictable scenarios; senseless deaths, rogue militias, strung up looters, and combatants in Hawaiian shirts.
It's nothing new. Like every other apocalyptic and future dystopian Hollywood movie, we are already well familiar with the nihilist concept of violent American societal implosion.
The movie has very little pace, suspense or tension. It was very predictable. The seemingly random insertion of occasional loud, bizarrely inappropriate, music was mystifying and distracting.
There's almost no military action in the film, except for at the ending; and it was laughably bad. The CGI was abysmal and there was zero evidence of any expert military advise being sought for the sake of realism. It was farcical.
The character development was atrocious. As a result, I found it very hard to have any emotional response to their experiences and suffering. There was simply no depth to them for a viewer to relate with.
The actors themselves did a decent enough job. However, being cast as a jaded, highly experienced, war journalists doesn't enable a lot of scope for getting across a depiction of the discovery of the horrors of war. They'd been there, done that, so what they witnessed in the civil war was nothing really new or worse.
Beyond the small band of seemingly disinterested main characters, absolutely no effort was made to unveil the perspectives and ambitions of other people. They were all cardboard cutouts; character void NPCs that only exist to progress a rudimentary plot.
You'd think that any movie about a civil war would relish the opportunity to add vibrancy and context through contrasting a myriad of conflicting motivations and beliefs. Why people fought. What it meant to them. Their aspirations, regrets and sacrifices. But, no, this was entirely neglected.
In fact, the only thing 'worse' was that this conflict was in the USA, not some unimportant foreign land. That is the only apparent horror - and it's something that might only cause a visceral reaction for more naive American viewers.
It's nowhere near enough to carry the movie given its many other flaws.
Overall, I felt this movie was a huge wasted opportunity. It could have been epic and clever. Instead it chose to be small and simplistic. I feel only disappointment as the closing credits role.
What we get instead was a bewildering road trip movie. A handful of supposedly veteran war journalists blunder across the land encountering a series of utterly predictable scenarios; senseless deaths, rogue militias, strung up looters, and combatants in Hawaiian shirts.
It's nothing new. Like every other apocalyptic and future dystopian Hollywood movie, we are already well familiar with the nihilist concept of violent American societal implosion.
The movie has very little pace, suspense or tension. It was very predictable. The seemingly random insertion of occasional loud, bizarrely inappropriate, music was mystifying and distracting.
There's almost no military action in the film, except for at the ending; and it was laughably bad. The CGI was abysmal and there was zero evidence of any expert military advise being sought for the sake of realism. It was farcical.
The character development was atrocious. As a result, I found it very hard to have any emotional response to their experiences and suffering. There was simply no depth to them for a viewer to relate with.
The actors themselves did a decent enough job. However, being cast as a jaded, highly experienced, war journalists doesn't enable a lot of scope for getting across a depiction of the discovery of the horrors of war. They'd been there, done that, so what they witnessed in the civil war was nothing really new or worse.
Beyond the small band of seemingly disinterested main characters, absolutely no effort was made to unveil the perspectives and ambitions of other people. They were all cardboard cutouts; character void NPCs that only exist to progress a rudimentary plot.
You'd think that any movie about a civil war would relish the opportunity to add vibrancy and context through contrasting a myriad of conflicting motivations and beliefs. Why people fought. What it meant to them. Their aspirations, regrets and sacrifices. But, no, this was entirely neglected.
In fact, the only thing 'worse' was that this conflict was in the USA, not some unimportant foreign land. That is the only apparent horror - and it's something that might only cause a visceral reaction for more naive American viewers.
It's nowhere near enough to carry the movie given its many other flaws.
Overall, I felt this movie was a huge wasted opportunity. It could have been epic and clever. Instead it chose to be small and simplistic. I feel only disappointment as the closing credits role.
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