Marketing hype polarizes while this point-and-shoot frames a view from nowhere. Released into a violently charged political moment, A24’s advertising arm promises glimpses of future war-torn America, which distorts writer/director Alex Garland’s story of a journalistic road trip across these disunited states.
The action is reasonably taut and adequately gruesome – a spurt of blood here, hanging bodies there – but not memorable. We’ve seen these images before in other places and other movies. The presentation of the journalists’ still photos is uninspired, leaving them lifeless.
The main cast gives a strong performance, breathing enough life to almost fool you into thinking the characters are more than snapshots. Dunst’s stoicism carries the lead role. Garland, however, refuses any true depth. In a quiet moment, Spaeny’s Jessie runs down the highlights of Dunst’s Lee’s Wikipedia page and asks, “What’s missing from it?” only for Lee to respond with a small insight about her parents before the dialogue drops the topic and the scene soon ends. The film thus squanders the overwhelming boringness of wars and road trips.
Overall Garland errs twice with the structure: first a focus through veteran Lee rather than amateur Jessie, and then an avoidance of any serious contemporary politics. Lee, unfazed and outwardly uncaring (if not inwardly), leaves us with little emotional resonance for gruesome war. Jessie would have been the better vessel for the audience’s struggle to comprehend, but her perspective is not centered until a blunt final scene. Meanwhile, the simple diorama of confused and muted politics – a few lines from Offerman’s third-term president and a gunfight with boys in Hawaiian shirts – lacks emotional punch to justify everyone’s violent anger. The imagery stands as an undeveloped reality.
The film’s lack of humanity and war imagery coalesce to a nihilist message: journalism doesn’t matter. Even after all your journalistic goals are achieved, you didn’t change anything, you just saw a lot of fucked up shit along the way. The public vicariously bears witness to horrors via images from afar, when we choose the momentary discomfort, but nothing changes before we find ourselves on the frontlines, seeing our neighbors and ourselves doing what humans do. Suppose they hyped a war film and no one cared.
Rated: liked.