Ten years ago, I could not have foreseen that one of my favorite activities — moviegoing — would soon be a miserable experience. The movies weren’t so great in the 2010s, with wokeness already rotting the industry, but nothing like the inept drivel on the big screen today. Progressive-driven incompetence spread so fast that just a half-decently crafted movie such as Oppenheimer seems a whole other art form. Now, for the most part, we get amateurish fare like the last two pictures I saw in the theater, The Boys in the Boat and Civil War.

That the latter title actually got away with it, becoming the previous weekend’s number one movie in America with $25-million dollars, only increased my melancholy. My colleague at The American Spectator, Tom Raabe, insightfully reviewed Civil War here as a film critic. I’ll address the movie as a fiction writer, film scholar, and Culture War correspondent. And I’ll put all three in the Civil War perspective.

I just finished editing the publisher’s (Aethon Books) edit of my new political thriller detective novel, The Apocalypse Mask, ahead of its fall publication. The editor, Rob, is the sharpest, most incisive editor I’ve ever had on any of my fiction. The fact that he is clearly to my left politically and thus challenging to some dialogue only made the book better. (READ MORE from Lou Aguilar: Laughter in the Court)

For instance, where one of my two DC private-eye heroes, Peter Cork, refers to Virginia as “a red state now,” Rob noted that Democrats have both senators and control of the legislature. But, I replied, in the law-and order-context Cork meant, there’s a hugely popular conservative governor (Glenn Youngkin), lieutenant governor (Winsome Earl-Sears), and attorney general (Jason Miyares). So, I left the line in, but clarified it in the book, improving a work of art.

And Rob raised my game on another scene in the novel. Cork’s partner, Mark Slade, gets knocked out by a group of eco militants, Green Strike (“I never thought I’d miss Greenpeace,” Slade says.). He wakes up in a barn with his wrists bound to a timber beam by rawhide cords. Rob correctly pointed out that radical environmentalists hate cows and would consequently eschew rawhide, a very high observation level. Cursing, I made the politically correct change to a hemp rope. Because Rob and I obviously respect our readers more than Civil War writer-director Alex Garland does his audience.

In my film scholarship and as a mystery writer under contract for three books, I’m currently reading From the Moment They Met It Was Murder: Double Indemnity and the Rise of Film Noir (Turner Classic Movies) by Alain Silver and James Ursini. But you don’t have to be a film scholar to know that Double Indemnity is not only the greatest film noir but one of the greatest films of all time. And both of those categories put in a different universe — another species — from Civil War.

That in 1943, the brilliant writer-director Billy Wilder and the finest hard-boiled detective novelist of all time, Raymond Chandler, collaborated on a motion picture for the benefit of art and our entertainment seems almost Homeric today. Beautifully written, marvelously constructed and interpreted, every scene is a lesson in storytelling lost on Garland and his ilk. They could have studied any character or line and been better filmmakers, such as the final exchange between wounded murderous insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) and his insurance investigator mentor Barton Keyes (a magnificent Edward G. Robinson):

Neff: Know why you couldn’t figure this one, Keyes? I’ll tell ya. ‘Cause the guy you were looking for was too close. Right across the desk from ya.

Keyes: Closer than that, Walter.

Neff: I love you too.

And yet this perfect ending to a masterpiece was almost not the ending. Adhering to the script, Wilder shot an entire final sequence of Neff being executed in the gas chamber, the set of which Paramount Pictures built at considerable expense. But in the wonderful lost alchemy of cinema, Wilder realized he already had the perfect ending, and the entire gas chamber sequence was scrapped.

Which sadly brings me, as a Culture War observer, to reflect on Civil War. I sat there in the theater watching this nonsensical fever dream that has not one genuine, logical, even interesting moment. It’s a poor — and brain-dead — man’s version of Apocalypse Now, similarly depicting a hellish odyssey through the outer fringes of a major war full of twisted characters and insane violence. Except the travelers aren’t soldiers but the most unbelievable quartet of “journalists” ever shown. (READ MORE: The Hollywoke Meltdown)

Where the Vietnam War was infernally real, Garland’s civil war is a ridiculous exploitation device that makes no political or dramatic sense — take Texas and California on the same side. But that’s the difference between true artists like Francis Ford Coppola and John Milius (The Wind and the Lion, Red Dawn) and a modern hack like Garland. The auteur gives zero explanation why the two photojournalists played by Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny are snapping single awkward Nikon pictures instead of video. Or why two Asian journalists are playing car games in a touchy racist battle zone. Or how Dunst could be a famous veteran war photographer when half the world at war would rape or kill her on the spot. Ask Lara Logan.

I would give a little credit to former Spider-Man cutie Dunst for appearing as a middle-age frump with not the slightest attempt at attractivity, except for the obligatory rejection of “the male gaze” by every idiot in Hollywoke. Typical awful line of dialogue by Cailee Spaeny to Dunst: “What’s the matter? You’re so war-torn you can’t even try on a dress?” Yes, she seriously said “war-torn.” It doesn’t really matter though since Dunst basically plays an asexual man rather than any woman in the real world. And so does Spaeny, who ludicrously wants to follow in her career, also unlike any woman in the real world.

If only they’d put Civil War through the editing process like I just got from Aethon Books. They’d have a better movie. As I’ll have a better book.