Goldbeater

The film is off to a very promising start. Some of the ideas concerning the perception of the world around the deaf-mute main character are quite entertaining, although the film doesn't try to work with them in any clever way. Similarly, they don't attempt much in terms of world-building, so the whole inner world feels as shallow as an arcade game level (which may have been the intention), plus they populate the plot with utterly futile, annoying and unmotivated bad guys (which may not have been the intention) and soon bog down in a very repetitive action spectacle without any substance (which certainly wasn't the intention). The film cuts the branch underneath itself with a twist in the last quarter that turns the whole plot on its head and commits the cheapest deception on the viewer that can be devised. It's no longer about being stylistically surprising, it's just helplessly messing with the script. And the rest, sadly, isn't nearly as engrossing and cool as it tries to be.

If you're going to make an unpretentious action comedy, this is how you do it. Putting aside the most questionable thing – the crime plot at the heart of the film is very simple and silly, but it's not really the point, the whole thing is pulled along by both the action-packed stunt attractions, but mostly by the charisma of the two leads. Ryan Gosling and Emily Blunt work great together, they have visible chemistry and their verbal banter at times almost makes you think of classic screwball romantic comedies. It's actually a nice love letter from Drew Pearce and David Leitch to all the stuntmen, the "invisible" crew members and filmmaking in general, and the idyllic romanticization of the whole creative process without a single hint of cynicism works very well for the audience.

For Alex Garland, Civil War is a return to the tried-and-tested formula of a group of characters wandering through an "inhuman" landscape in pursuit of a vague goal, but compared to 28 Days Later, Annihilation and Sunshine, the British filmmaker is now dealing with a rather down-to-earth and quite realistic scenario. I've always seen him as a very capable genre filmmaker and I also got what I expected from his latest effort: a solid simple genre film; don't expect anything complicated or deep. The relative straightforwardness actually suits Garland far more than the artsy symbolism of his previous two efforts, which is also not to say that Civil War completely resigns itself to it. If I have one criticism, it's some all-too-obvious visual choices, in a film that, given the premise, would be best served by a straightforward and almost documentary-like approach, the director too often tries to frame the characters in all symmetry in the middle of the frame, as if they were in a Wes Anderson film, and it doesn't quite fit the concept. On the other hand, I appreciate that Garland didn't reach for some low-hanging fruit in the script and somehow politicised the film in a one-sided way at its core, so we get a story that is balanced and, most importantly, not black-and-white.