It’s at least a little ironic that a film is titled Civil war, about a broken America at war with itself, is designed to be guaranteed to be divisive. For me, I found it exciting, surprising and skillfully made. It’s a fantastic film and, with some caveats, a remarkable feat of filmmaking.
But there is no doubt that it is a real provocation, and it provokes as much for what it leaves out as for what it includes.
And why Civil war it is a political film without overt politics. It is a war film in which the nature of the dispute is not entirely clear. It’s a film about journalism and journalistic ethics in which the media as we know it is a hollowed-out shell of its former self, almost an afterthought. It’s a film of the moment, culled from think pieces about a polarized and divided country that refuses to explain the causes of that division or propose anything like a solution. If you’re looking for a headline, a diagnosis, a lead, a thesis statement, a compact Tweetable lecture, a cable news roundtable discussion point, you won’t find it. Civil war it’s designed to make you feel empty, exhausted, and adrift. It’s a war film without a shot.
Written and directed by Alex Garland, the writer behind it The beach AND 28 days later and the mind behind it Ex Machina, Annihilation, and what is still underrated Developers, Civil war it’s not quite a science fiction film, but it bears some of the same hallmarks of the genre. It is a dystopian thought experiment about the nature of humanity and morality in a world where the rules and conventions usually taken for granted have collapsed.
As in those earlier works, what Garland posits is that the bonds of civil society – the hidden social customs, expectations, and rules that ensure that most people act with something like decency and mutual respect – are much more fragile and contingent than we think. . Civilization, in Garland’s stories, is not maintained.
At the beginning of the film, the American Civil War is already well underway, to the point of almost being taken for granted.
The Western Forces (WF), a coalition made up of California and Texas, are heading towards Washington, D.C., where a president (Nick Offerman) remains beyond his second term. A third faction, the Florida Alliance, is also in play, perhaps in alliance with the WF, perhaps with its own agenda. But the nature of the conflict and the backstory remain unclear.
Garland’s script plays evasively on what appear to be crucial questions of context, briefly referring, for example, to an “antifa massacre.” But wait, it was the massacre against antifa? OR Of antifa? If you are looking for answers to questions like wWhat are the precise political objectives of the factions? you won’t find them. It’s war. It’s complicated and it’s ugly. It’s mostly about staying alive.
Or document the brutality. The protagonists of the film are a quartet of journalists: there are the famous photojournalist Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and Joel (Wagner Moura), a writer, both working for Reuters, plus Sammy, an older and heavier journalist who walks with a stick and work for “what’s left of.” The New York Times.” And then there’s Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a young woman who idolizes Smith and who makes her way into the car with the other three. They’re headed from New York to Washington, D.C., which thanks to the dangers of war, has become an 800 mile trip, to see what happens when the WF finally breaches the White House.
What follows is a tense, terrifying, and increasingly surreal journey through a war-torn, almost apocalyptic America, where gas station attendants hang looters and scenes of holiday cheer are marked by dead bodies. The quartet of journalists are not there to stop the war or change its course. They are only there to witness what happens, to record it for others to observe and decide.
Garland’s film shares the same ethos. It’s episodic, fragmented, essentially a twist on the road movie. We see fragments of the war-torn landscape and watch journalists engage in firefights and capture contextless images of desolation and destruction. But there is never a macro vision. War, the film suggests, can only be experienced in fragments, in moments, in scattered stories that don’t always add up to something elegant and coherent.
Jessie, the youngest of the group, initially wonders if they can make a difference in some way. She wants to be a force for good in a landscape marked by atrocity. But she is warned by the older and more cynical journalists with whom she travels. Their job is not to alter the trajectory of the war, but only to capture it. There is inevitably something brutal in their work, a sense of cosmic fatalism.
With Civil war, then, Garland doesn’t ask the questions you might expect from a film like this: Why do Americans fight each other? Who is right on the issues, on the merits? The film presents a dramatic case in which the problems, the merits, the Why of all this they are mostly not the point where the bullets whiz by the head.
NO, Civil war is interested in other questions: What would it be like to live in an America ravaged by violent conflict? What would the consequences be? How would the conflict play out in the cities and streets of America’s East Coast? Because once a nation has come to the brink of war, the film seems to say, the Why of all this, the who is right? becomes irrelevant. All that remains is violence.
Some viewers will no doubt view Garland’s choice to avoid controversial political issues as dodging, cheating, a reluctance to address the issues or offending certain parties. Media critics will complain that her film is successful View from nowherethat it is ultimately an extended exercise in taking sides on both sides of America’s political divides.
But I found the film’s refusal to engage in that sort of easy partisan debate not only refreshing but clarifying: it’s not both sides American politics as much as without taking sides an ugly, horrible conflict where no one comes out with the moral high ground.
Civil war it is not an editorial in film form. It’s not a viral clip about what other people are like True fascists. It’s not a sick burn or an empty boast to retweet on social media. It’s a film about what happens After these arguments result in prolonged violence. Because when that happens, there are no good guys, no winners, no sides to take. You can only watch in horror, in scattered bits and pieces that don’t quite add up, and then decide for yourself.