In writer/director Alex Garland’s Civil War, the United States has broken after a third-term president (Nick Offerman) has disbanded the FBI, attacked his own citizens, and used the power of the government to remain in office. The forces of California and Texas have joined an unlikely alliance to depose the American president. With this conflict escalating, we follow a group of journalists, primarily prize-winning war photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and her would-be protege Jessie (Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny), as they drive from New York down to D.C. with the intention of getting one more interview with the president before it all comes to a bloody end.
Civil War is Garland’s (Ex Machina, Men) attempt to evoke the ethos of journalists who stress merely trying to depict the world rather than question it. It’s a movie really about shared trauma, as these characters are plunged into a world where your neighbor might be stringing up men at the car wash. Garland’s sound design does him major credit at being able to keep his audience unsettled, not just in the melange of gunfire and explosions but also the absence of sound. After one close explosion, the sound drops completely for over a minute. During key parts of the frantic action, the movie will cut to the black and white images of our photographers, providing an immediate reprieve to contemplate as a depiction of what is taking place. Garland’s movie keeps things on a realistic level and is really less of a movie about an America on the brink than a story of journalists going about their dangerous job. It just so happens that instead of it being Afghanistan or Syria or other more familiar war zones that it’s the United States. As a simplified, point-A-to-point B war zone road trip, the movie works well enough, unless, that is, you’re expecting anything more than the quasi-objective documentation of terrible acts.
However, that same ethos of centrist non-engagement also kept me struggling to really invest in the movie. I kept waiting for… simply more to happen, for insightful exchanges with our characters, for harrowing moments really crystallizing the state of this nation, for clues that gave a clearer picture of the larger conflicts and how the United States got to this point. For anyone expecting much from Offerman’s presidential character, he’s literally in the movie for, at best, two minutes. The far majority of the movie follows along on this road trip with these undeveloped characters taking pictures of occasionally upsetting and occasionally mundane events, although the totality of these events fails to add up to a clearer picture or more coherent social commentary. I just kept waiting for the characters to get more compelling, along with the conflict, and it just didn’t. I think we were following the wrong characters, people who are trying to stay objective and above it all, because then they’re just stand-ins for a camera and a microphone. We know Lee is a celebrated war photographer, and we get snippets of her past worldwide skirmishes, but what else do we know about her? What else do we know about Jessie, besides she’s an aspiring photographer who idolizes Lee? Does a mentorship relationship form? Not really. Does a rivalry form? Not really. The characters are just there, opaque, acting essentially no more than a stand-in for the audience. Now there’s a deeper conversation to be had about the ethics of embedded journalism, of documenting horror rather than intervening, or turning tragedy into digestible art for the masses. What are the ethics of non-intervention and holding to one’s moral objectivity in the face of the most objectionable? However, this is not the movie interested in having that conversation.
The world of this civil war felt strangely unaffected. Hotels are going about their business, WiFi is carrying on, local shops are carrying on their discounts. I understand that part of this is meant to be surreal, the juxtaposition of a nation going about business as usual, even though these are unusual circumstances, but it makes the movie feel less significant, and the cavalier attitude of the characters continually betraying the stakes of the drama. If it’s just another assignment, how bad can it be? It makes Civil War feel like there’s hardly much of a civil war going on, which begs the question why even tackle this concept if this is it? If you have a movie about an American civil war but pussyfoot around on the why, forgo making the impact felt, and have the majority of the characters shrug it all off, then why are you even going through this story? The apolitical nature makes it so that many viewers will project their own perspectives and prejudices to fill out the unspoken history. It’s an interesting artistic decision but also one that nagged at me as a “both sides are bad” declaration to the middle to tell us that polarization is the real enemy.
There are a few sudden jolts and unsettling moments in the movie, but watching Civil War feels like I’m only watching 45% of a movie that will never be filled in. By that I don’t mean I need every point spoon-fed to my stupid plebeian brain, but I needed a movie where the time added up to something more substantial than “people do bad things during war.” I kept mentally going back to The Purge franchise, a concept that asked what people might do if they had a brief window of lawless freedom, and what that says about us as a society when the rules are put on hold. That is a franchise that embraces its genre roots and premise but finds ways to make its concept a reflection of our troubled times, and while it’s blunt commentary, when we have Nazis marching in the streets, maybe blunt times call for blunt commentary. Civil War feels so timid to say anything really that might be relevant to our current anxious and fractious political climate. Civil War was disappointing to the point that I was longing for the clarity and conviction of The Purge franchise.
There are so many different versions of this story and concept that can prove compelling, so it’s all the more mystifying for me why Garland wanted to pick this version. Imagine a grueling Downfall-style drama about the last hours inside the White House of a three-term fascistic president who turned on his own people and enacted a bloody civil war, and imagine watching those closest to him reconcile with their own culpability as well as the resignation of the end coming for all of them and what they have done. Or even imagine a similar version about being behind enemy lines and looking for safe harbor, not knowing which American could be trustworthy and which might ultimately be a defector (as Jesse Plemons so ominously says in the movie’s intense high point, “Okay, but what kind of American are you?”). There’s a little known indie war movie from 2017 called Bushwick, starring Brittany Snow and Dave Bautista, that has a similar premise, following a military invasion of Brooklyn (Texas allies with the Southern states to attack the big cities, though they didn’t expect so much push-back from the locals). This is a better version of the similar modern civil war premise, with characters that are more compelling, a conflict that keeps upending our sense of safety, and some gutsy filmmaking choices, not all of them successful (the ending is too bleak and mean and deserved a ray of hope). There are myriad ways to tell this story and make it engaging and though-provoking, and Garland inexplicably chose this dull option. You could do worse than Civil War, but with such tantalizing dramatic potential, you could do better.
Nate’s Grade: C+