By: Will Hume
You might have seen it online if it’s not a conversation you’ve had in person. If a Civil War broke out in the United States, what lines would be drawn, and who would win?
Enter British writer Alex Garland. Garland, the son of a political cartoonist, burst onto the scene at 26 with his novel The Beach, a travelogue thriller about a spoiled utopia, whose eventual film adaptation starring Leonardo DiCaprio mirrored its story in unfortunate ways. His first screenplay and follow-up were the futuristic apocalyptic thrillers 28 Days Later and Sunshine, directed by future Slumdog Millionaire Oscar winner Danny Boyle. The former was a breakthrough success; the latter was a box office bomb. Both were relatively well-received. Garland’s next move was a unique one, opting to adapt the novel Journey to the West as a video game; Enslaved: Odyssey to the West for future Hellblade developer Ninja Theory. I am a big fan of stories in video games and bought Odyssey to the West and lent it to John Breault, who then made his own journey to the West without returning the game to me. John, if you are reading this, send it via mail!
Garland then made his directorial debut with Ex Machina, another sci-fi film he wrote and was eventually Oscar-nominated for his screenplay. I remember it being well-received at the time, with IGN giving it a 9, and although personally, I did not like it as much as others, I did successfully bet on it in my Oscar pool. Unlike Focus Features CEO Peter Schlessel, who passed on it, so Universal passed his job onto someone else.
Enter A24 Films, a 2-year-old Manhattan-based distribution company rooted in digital marketing, which had early success with Spring Breakers (one of my earliest reviews). They saw the potential in Ex Machina and distributed the film in North America after Universal passed. Ex Machina became an art-house hit and collected A24 their first Oscar. They maintained their thrifty strategy of going all in on digital spending with next to no physical presence, driving rival studios crazy. They allegedly spent nothing the year their first produced film, Moonlight, won Best Picture. This began their expansion into production, adapting the Israeli television series Euphoria for HBO. Their ability to attract younger audiences to arthouse cinema was famously referenced by Jenna Ortega in Scream 5, referring to many of their films as “elevated horror” despite the fact they are mostly a distribution company. Brand recognition is a top value of social media and now Wall Street. Backed by private equity and with a solid business model of backing young creatives cheaply and theatrically, the independent studio is at 2.5 billion dollars. Since then, the studio explored a sale for $3 billion, and then historically swept the Oscars in 2022 with a record-breaking win for all of the top-line Oscars; Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Supporting Actress for the films Everything Everywhere All At Once and The Whale, which scored additional wins for Editing and Makeup. No studio in the 96 years of Academy Award history has done that. Those two films have a combined cost of roughly 25 million dollars and made $200 million, doubling the studio’s initial investment 4 times over. A24, which had started as a five-person team less than a decade ago, single-handedly successfully took on streaming giants Netflix and Amazon, which had spent tens of millions of dollars on their own awards contenders: All Quiet On The Western Front and Women Talking.
But the problem with being so small is that when you have all these breakthrough directors on your slate you can’t hold onto them. So Garland’s next film, which he wrote and directed, Annihilation, dabbled in streaming, but not by choice. The R-rated film was made by Paramount Pictures for 40 million dollars. An adaptation of a novel about a group of women led by a cellular biologist and a psychologist who enter a literal No Man’s Land to investigate an alien anomaly. Garland’s mother is a psychologist, and his grandfather Peter Medawar was a renowned biologist, so he was uniquely suited to the material. However, a highly publicized fallout between major producers Scott Rudin and David Ellison led to a worldwide rights split 2 months before release.
Rudin (60), was an awards magnate coming off the success of Lady Bird. Ellison (35), a blockbuster producer coming off of the bomb Geostorm. Ellison was concerned over a bad test screening and reportedly thought that the film was “too intellectual” and “too complicated”. He recommended changes to make the film appeal to a wider audience. This included making the lead character more sympathetic and tweaking the film’s ending. Rudin, who had the final cut and had worked with Garland before on Ex Machina, sided with the director. But there was a typical Hollywood problem. The previous Paramount administration that had greenlit the film was fired, and the current one had a major co-financing deal with Ellison’s studio Skydance, which made Paramount’s two most important franchises: Mission: Impossible and Star Trek. Ellison did not want the bad test screening to go unanswered and a second Box Office bomb in a row would severely impact Skydance Productions. Not wanting to muddy the waters, Paramount opted to sell the international rights (sans China) to Netflix to cover the investment cost, resulting in a split release strategy with the International streaming date arriving 17 days later. The movie underperformed at the box office, doing moderate business but not enough to justify its 40 million budget.
From my own perspective in Reddit circles, his work has always been highly praised going back to 28 Days Later. What I saw however were big ideas and simplistic characters, making dumb decisions to advance the plot in a didactic way. A dumb person’s idea of smart. But perhaps I think that way because in Fifth Grade I also had the idea for a sci-fi story about a group of astronauts who journey across space to reignite our dying sun. Imagine my excitement at seeing the trailer online and then disappointment at realizing that the movie wasn’t as good as what I imagined in my 10-year-old brain.
Garland expanded his reach to television with the miniseries Devs, which he wrote and directed every episode of. The show premiered on the FX channel and streamed on Hulu in the United States on March 5th, 2020 just as the pandemic was heating up there. Like with most of his projects, critics gave the show very high marks, but some fan reactions were less enthusiastic. Reflecting the polarity in his New York Times review James Poniewozik wrote “It showcases what Garland does well—ideas and atmosphere—while amplifying his weaknesses in character and plot.” Writing for The Atlantic Sophie Gilbert said, “It is only the latest in a series of puzzle-box shows more preoccupied with their own cleverness and their labyrinthine twists than with the burden of watchability.” Finally, in one of the show’s most critical reviews, Willa Paskin of Slate Magazine wrote that it’s “more quantum physics brainteaser than an actual show…. bad television that’s striving to be great, that’s got ideas and style but sinks under the weight of its own oversize[d] ambition.” Yet the discussion-worthy nature of Garland’s themes helped the show build an audience and the following year Disney revealed it was one of its most popular FX on Hulu series. These corporations love their niches.
Men, Garland’s third directed film brought him back to A24 and was decently reviewed but not as well as its predecessors with a 69 percent favourable rating with critics and a dreaded 39 percent favourable rating with audiences on Rotten Tomatoes. Many of the reviews said it was far too simplistic and Garland’s reach exceeded his grasp and pointed to the weird ending and the director’s the culprit. One woman explained to me her dislike of it “It’s a whole movie about a guy explaining to you how bad it is to be a woman.” A male user wrote “You think it’s weird? Sit through the last 20 minutes? Total disaster.” Endings, particularly with character actions have long been the main critique of Garland’s original written works, while his non-directed adaptations of the novel Never Let Me Go and comic book Judge Dredd received less criticism. Did the criticisms alter his focus? While in production for Civil War, he said he was a director only out of convenience and that he was “not planning to direct for the foreseeable future.”
So given Civil War is his fourth directed film, how might he learn from his mistakes as his complexion becomes clearer, flaws and all. By leaning into directorial instincts, embracing the political cartoonery of his father, and following the dumbest smart profession of all… journalism. Where stupidity is often rationalized. A job covered by brilliant intellects and brainless hacks alike, a reader cannot usually tell the difference until the job is done. Where do the characters in this film place on that spectrum? Now there’s a story worth pursuing.
Props to A24 for funding this film themselves, which I do not think would be made by any of the major studios as an R-rated $50 million budgeted film. Post-pandemic the Hollywood production landscape has changed. For reference, that’s $10 million more than the last Spielberg film, which was PG-13, and a bit less than the budget of the similarly R-rated Joker without a built-in fan base. Meanwhile, theatre attendance hasn’t returned to what they were pre-pandemic which is over 4 years ago now. The movie’s biggest star is Kirsten Dunst, who is more active in the independent circuit than the Hollywood hits that defined her early career. So why is it a studio known more for small dramas and folk horror springing for a large action film? With A24’s success, they have grown in size and to maintain that growth they have had to make bigger bets. To retain the talents of directors like Ari Aster who delivered two of their biggest hits in Hereditary and MidSommar means backing risky projects like the 3-hour R-rated Surreal-Horror-Odyssey Beau is Afraid, which cost the studio 35 million dollars to produce and only made 11 million in theatres. Meanwhile, directors like Greta Gerwig and Robert Eggers who started with the studio fled to bigger projects. Civil War in the vein of an action-thriller is more broadly appealing escapism, with more commercial cinema as the next frontier for the group. Only given the current political climate will it hit too close to home?
The reason I was hesitant to see this film, the reason that I didn’t go to it until the second Cheap Tuesday, (which is just Tuesday now that they have added the bullsh*t convenience fees to bring the costs over $22 for two in a no-frills theatre) is because I wasn’t confident despite the trailers that this company and director could pull off a straightforward action film that didn’t turn out to be 90% philosophizing, similar to Annihilation. Although two A24 films I was dragged by my older brother to the theatre for; Lady Bird & Hereditary were great, Midsommar was less so. A24 releases several films with high critic ratings and low audience scores like David Lowery’s The Green Knight, a painfully slow beautiful-looking excruciatingly boring and pretentious art house film which was re-edited after COVID delays to be longer, more challenging, and less commercial. With social media offering more visibility to filmmakers with a niche it seems like a certain crop can afford the privilege of getting their movie made how they want, and are in competition with each other to see who can make a bigger bomb and raise a bigger cult following. All the while finding new ways to scorn both the studio who gave them the money and audiences who didn’t. Is it everyone for themselves? With aggregate freelancing, is there even a reliable publication that can consistently say; I understand what you are getting at, it looks nice, and the themes are all there but this is all boring for us normies. Is Civil War boring? Stay tuned.
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