Review of The Second Civil War

Calling it the near future in the beginning without specifying the year worked great since this could've been the actual state of the USA a couple of years ago, being absolutely the black comedy in real life. The beginning of India nuking Pakistan was not something I expected from this movie. But then that leading to internal conflict in the US, then personal situations of politicians and the prejudices of people working together to make everything worse and worse as it went on all were really great ideas. Choosing to centre the movie in a newsroom so they can cover everywhere was also a great choice. There are just so many great ideas in this film and so many commentaries made. A lot of them worked and a lot of them didn't. It was a bit overcrowded. I feel like this would've worked better if it was much longer with more things grounding it to the narrative to let the messages speak for themselves. The whole wasn't really as great as the sum of the parts. There are many things in it that are shown like they are exposing stuff, while the direction makes it feel like even while showing such things, they are not understanding the actual complexities and believe in a more idealistic world without considering what should actually be done. It could also be attributed that a lot of these might be considered hyperbolic in the 90s while it feels much closer to reality now, so that may be why the very Americanised idealistic view the makers had that they were afraid to be broken. There are also many aspects of it that clearly show this is a pre-9/11 American movie, which couldn't have been part of such a movie afterwards.

Overall, I loved a lot of it but thought some of it was pretty stupid. However, as a movie, it did work to get its point across, and being almost prophetic of how The US has become recently, it deserves appreciation, even though it has its fair share of flaws.