Cinematography of Civil War (2024)

Very curious what other cinematographers thought about this film.

In a formal sense, really enjoyed the film. Big fan of Alex Garland directorially, even though this doesn’t feel like his strongest piece, still is a quality film in my opinion.

Visually I thought the still photography cutaways were really beautifully done. There were a couple of very powerful frames throughout that really stuck with me.

However, I just genuinely cannot get over how it looks as a whole. I initially thought the entire film was shot on the DJI Camera, but to my shock it turns out it was predominately Venice 2.

Some of the shots looked incredibly rough— in a technical sense felt like high school student film level. It felt like every day exterior had blown highlights or were being pushed to the edge of clipping. I initially attributed this to a limited DJI sensor but there’s genuinely no excuse if it’s a Venice.

My deduction then is it must have been an intentional color grading decision. I understand to some degree that MAYBE it’s supposed to feel “documentarian” but almost no other element of the cinematic language or camera movement lent itself to that hypothetically “grounded” tone. I think there’s a tasteful way to do a hot highlights look but I feel like it lacked any kind of rolloff or nuance.

As far as lensing, really some aggressive choices made there. Haven’t been able to dig up what they ended up shooting on— curious if anyone has insight there.

Listen, I’m no better than the next guy as far as shooting WFO goes but this felt like a significant lack of restraint— felt very “Army of the Dead” muddy at times. Probably just a DP-brain thing but I felt like there were a fairly decent amount of distracting lens moments. Really wasn’t into the Ultra RGB chromatic aberration motif either.

Apologies for the rant. Just wondering if this stuff irked anyone else as much as it did for me. For me it was the main drawback of an otherwise solid film.