война Film
Angie Troia
The film begins with the protagonist, former conscript Ivan Yermakov (Alexei Chadov), being interviewed by a journalist in a detention center. As he begins recounting his story, the film cuts to Chechnya in the summer of 2001, during the Second Chechen War. Held captive by Chechen warlord Aslan Gugayev (Georgy Gurguliya), Ivan and another conscript, Fedya, serve as domestic slaves, while Aslan also uses Ivan as a communications specialist. Eventually, Aslan's militants also capture English actor John Boyle (Ian Kelly) and his fiance Margaret Michaelsen (Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė). After a while, Ivan, Fedya, and the two English prisoners are taken to another aul and put into a zindan where they find Captain Medvedev (Sergei Bodrov, Jr.), who is paralyzed due to injury.
John's efforts to raise money are unsuccessful, but one British television company offered to provide him with financial assistance in exchange for extensive video footage of the operation. In Moscow, John again runs into the complete indifference of military officials and instead decides to ask Ivan to help him rescue Margaret.
Ivan's life in Tobolsk is not working out. He cannot adapt to a peaceful civilian life, and he cannot find work due to fears over his potentially unbalanced psyche after Chechen captivity. Before that, he comes to St. Petersburg, to the family of Captain Medvedev, whom no one is willing to rescue. When John comes to Tobolsk, Ivan agrees to go back to Chechnya in exchange for money. After passing through Moscow and Vladikavkaz, Ivan and John covertly enter Chechnya, seizing an SUV with a large number of weapons in the trunk en route. On their way, they kidnap a local, Ruslan Shamayev (Euclid Kyurdzidis), and Ivan finds the road to Gugayev's aul. After waiting for a large group of militants to depart, Ivan, John, and Ruslan attack the aul. Having killed the guards with the weapons they had seized earlier, they find Margaret with Captain Medvedev and discover that the militants had raped her. Enraged, John kills Gugayev, further complicating the situation: Ivan needed Gugayev alive as a hostage to leave Chechnya safely.
Gugayev's militants assault the aul and give chase, but the group escapes on a makeshift raft and takes up defensive positions in an old fortress tower. With the help of a satellite phone taken from Aslan, Medvedev requests support from the Air Force. Russian Mi-24 helicopters arrive, routing the militants, and deliver Medvedev and the group to a military base.
The film ends with Ivan's brief comments. Margaret did not marry John. John, having filmed the trip, released a movie and a book, titled "My Life in Russia." After the release of his film, Ivan was brought to trial for "the murder of peaceful citizens of the Russian Federation." Ruslan, who moved to Moscow, testified against Ivan. The only one who stood up for Ivan was Captain Medvedev.
Balabanov aspired to make the film incredibly realistic, to the point of naturalism. Before shooting, he interviewed former captives from the First Chechen War, traveled to the villages of Kabardino-Balkaria, met with General Viktor Kazantsev, the commander of the Russian troops in Chechnya, and watched videotapes chronicling Chechen atrocities. Some of these tapes he demonstrated to the English actor Ian Kelly. According to Balabanov, during the showing Kelly was shaking.
For greater realism, real Chechens played most of the Chechens, and Russian soldiers played most of the troops in the film. Due to the war, the film was only partially filmed on Chechen lands, in particular at the checkpoint at the entrance to Grozny. The film was shot in near-warlike conditions.[1] The shooting took place in quiet areas, and SOBR officers guarded the crew.
When shooting the scenes with the captives in the zindan, the crew dug out a real pit. The actors laid in the wet, filthy hole for several hours, as Balabanov wanted everything to be as realistic as possible. The scene with actress Ingeborga Dapkūnaitė floating naked in a cold rapid was filmed without using a double.[2]
During the filming in Kabardino-Balkaria, a helicopter used for the film produced thermal shots, and one of them accidentally got into an ancient Balkar cemetery, as a result of which it caught fire and destroyed many of the graves. The incident almost caused a conflict between the film crew and the residents. Among the SOBR officers guarding the group was a former Chechen captain, who was able to stop the infuriated crowd. On the set, all but Bodrov and Dapkūnaitė lived in the homes of the residents. Balabanov lived in the house of a woman whose ancestors' tombs were destroyed in the incident.[3]
I struggled to articulate this tingling uneasiness I had with the film. But what I finally realized was that it had always been doomed by being so grossly white-elephant art that it would never be able to remove itself from its subjectivity.
The use of an anamorphic lens plays particularly awkwardly. When framing individuals in the medium wide shot, this technique tends to drown out the clutter around them, so that we can focus on the character. Here, it only makes them feel distant rather than bringing us closer to them, disallowing the intimacy the audience should be achieving as we become close to our maligned main characters.
The third act is the strongest, building to a thrilling if predictable finish. A neat, serendipitous story plays out there, too, where Lee needs to be taken care of while her young protege Jessie Cullen (Cailee Spaeny) pushes forward expertly. Again, the film technique was not so bad. Certainly nothing extraordinary but indubitably adequate.
Currently, the United States is pursuing military campaigns in seven countries; Somalia, Yemen, Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, and Lybia. Two more, for a total of nine, if you include the aid we are supplying to Ukraine and Israel. I was born too young to enlist for war in the Middle East, I have lived long enough to be of age to enlist for war in the Middle East, and eventually, I will have been born too late to enlist for whatever evolution of war is still going on in the Middle East.
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The film captures, I think brilliantly, the idle chaos of such a scenario. A world simultaneously shutting down and carrying on with life. Of people mostly trying to survive and wait it out. Mostly. There are some who are not sitting it out, putting themselves in contexts where they can play out their dreams to be heroes or monsters, never accomplishing anything but spreading a little extra death around. I kept thinking about the pandemic on the drive home from the theater. Millions of people died but most of our memories at the peak of the lockdown are of feeling trapped and bored. A civil war in a country this big might not feel all that different for months or even years at a time for most of the population.
Writing from Europe my biggest question about this literalist take is where is that endless American desire to imbue every action or event with meaning? Narcissistic over-interpretation and subtextual analysis is what you guys have been doing since we shipped a bunch of monomaniacal Puritans across the Atlantic.
Whatever you expect from an Alex Garland movie, he always gives you something else."Civil War" is something else again. It premiered in the US hours before I published this and it's already divisive. I look forward to reading all of the arguments for and against, even though both early raves and pans seem to be operating under the reductive assumption that it's one of three things: (1) an alternative future history of a divided United States that's intended as a cautionary tale; (2) a technically proficient but empty-headed misery porn compendium that derives much of its power from images redolent of genocide and/or lynching, but ducks political specifics so as not to offend reactionaries; or (3) a visionary spectacular with ultra-violence that might or might not have something important to say but will definitely look and sound great on an expensive home entertainment system.
As it turns out, "Civil War" is mainly something else: a thought experiment about journalistic ethics, set in a future United States, yet reminiscent of classic movies about Western journalists covering the collapse of foreign countries, such as "The Year of Living Dangerously," "Salvador," "Under Fire," and "Welcome to Sarajevo."
How utterly bizarre, you might think. And in the abstract, it is bizarre. But "Civil War" is a furiously convincing and disturbing thing when you're watching it. It's a great movie that has its own life force. It's not like anything Garland has made. It's not like anything anyone has made, even though it contains echoes of dozens of other films (and novels) that appear to have fed the filmmaker's imagination.
Specifically, and most originally, "Civil War" is a portrait of the mentality of pure reporters, the types of people who are less interested in explaining what things "mean" (in the manner of an editorial writer or "pundit") than in getting the scoop before the competition, by any means necessary. Whether the scoop takes the form of a written story, a TV news segment, or a still photo that wins a Pulitzer, the quest for the scoop is an end unto itself, and it's bound up with the massive dopamine hit that that comes from putting oneself in harm's way. The kinds of obsessive war correspondents who rarely come back to their own countries don't care about the real-world impact of the political realities encoded within the epic violence they chronicle, or else compartmentalize it to stay focused.
The group gains a fourth member, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny, the title character of "Priscilla"), a kind of junior version of Lee who idolizes her. Jessie charms the hard-drinking, on-the-prowl Joel and ends up joining the trio as they drive to Washington, D.C. in hopes of interviewing the president (Nick Offerman) before he surrenders to the military forces of something called the WA, or Western Alliance. The WA consists of militias from California and Texas (with secondary support from Florida, which is apparently a different separatist group that shares the WA's values).
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