Review: Civil War

Whose Side are You On? Does it Matter?

I was disturbed by Alex Garland’s CIVIL WAR. No shock there, right? The film is about a near-future U.S. at war with itself, a notion none of us care to contemplate. Well... most of us don’t want to think about that. And that’s my point: It’s the minority that might be enjoying the prospect of armed conflict within our borders that makes the film disturbing in a way I’m not sure its auteur intended.

The film focuses on a quartet of reporters: Lee (Kirsten Dunst), a photojournalist toughened in the forge of foreign conflicts; her partner correspondent, Joel (Wagner Moura); aging veteran Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson); and wet-behind-the-ears photojournalist Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). Taking a circuitous route from New York City – where people are rioting over water rations – through Pennsylvania and Virginia, they head by car to a besieged Washington D.C, where Joel, in what his companions regard as a suicide mission, hopes to break into a blockaded White House and interview the quasi-fascistic President (Nick Offerman).

Garland pulls a lot from the lore of modern-day war correspondents – the embeds with whatever army or militia will have them; the days spent in high-risk situations, followed by nights in the relative safety of their hotels, drinking and bullshitting. There’s a definite power to taking the foreign conflicts we’ve seen from the safe remove of our TVs and placing it square-smack-dab on home soil, in a context where snipers square off within a tacky, Christmas tourist trap and a group of armed service station attendants torture looters back behind the garage. What starts out elegiac with lashings of terror turns full-on nightmare as the film progresses, with the journalists first stumbling upon some half-insane soldiers tending to an open grave, and then winding up in D.C. during the final siege of the rebel forces.

This is where the film truly hits home, with Garland providing full immersion in what too many people who are not residents of the good ol’ U.S. of A. are suffering around the world. I wouldn’t say it’s documentary-accurate – there are things like a helicopter delivering blasts of rapid-fire that look too much like laser beams – yet the unrelenting immersion into chaos and terror feels real enough to get the message across.

There are weirdnesses here. The journalists travel through a United States that feels oddly unpopulated – at one point they wend their way through a highway littered with abandoned cars, something we’ve seen in zombie and plague films, but that I’m not sure makes sense in a war scenario. Not all of the character beats feel natural – the war-hardened Lee starts out overtly hostile to newbie Jessie, but turns maternal perhaps a little too fast. After Jessie gets thrown into the open grave, she vouchsafes that “I’ve never been scared like that before, and I’ve never felt more alive,” maybe the film’s most unintentionally cringey moment. And the death of a certain character at the end of the film grates not because it’s so predictable, but because the way it’s handled seems less designed to play as believable as to deliver an ironic point.

Garland keeps the politics justifiably vague. We don’t know what was the inciting event that split the country. We may see the President rehearsing Trumpian, hyperbolic declarations, but by dint of casting Offerman in the role, the film avoids devolving the man into a similar, ignorant boor. The rebel forces are a seeming alliance of the southern states, plus California, which given that state’s political bifurcation still tracks, but allows some wiggle room. And if the president is a fascist – he’s serving a third term, and it’s implied that journalists have been executed by his decree – then the war with the right-leaning South is, at the very least, curious. (All this is in contrast to the news that CIVIL WAR producer A24 has decided to put its documentary THE SIXTH – about the real insurrection on Jan. 6 – behind a paywall, rather than release it to Amazon Prime, as was originally intended. Which raises the question of whether ambiguity is an admirable attempt at being realistic, or just being over-cautious.)

The problem with not drawing a more distinct line is that it allows viewers on both sides of the divide to justify their worldviews. I have a nagging feeling that the lesson I take away from CIVIL WAR may not be same one others are learning. Garland’s intent may be – probably is – to convey in full the nightmare that would be the fall of the American experiment, and in that he has succeeded to a soul-ripping extent. But I’m not sure everyone watching a finale where the rebels trounce the Federal forces while the president cravenly begs for his life would see that scenario as a nightmare. It’s not Garland’s responsibility if his tale is misread, but it does bug me.