The Current Debate is a column that connects the dots between great writing about a topic in the wider film conversation.
Civil War (Alex Garland, 2024).
Every now and then there comes a film so in tune with our pestilential zeitgeist as to earn that most dangerous of descriptors: important. I can’t think of many words more vacuous, not only because of all the questions it leaves unanswered (important to whom, exactly, and why?), but also because of the argument it peddles: that a film’s ability to sponge the mood of our times should count as an artistic merit. A film is important because it deals with important topics, or so the logic goes; it is necessary because these are things we all should care about, lessons we ought to treasure, and warnings we must heed. In this Neanderthal worldview, art is reduced to propaganda, and audiences to crowds who must be educated and pandered to. But if you need to be reminded that wars are awful, say, or that prolonged exposure to violence can numb your psyche, then you have issues that no film could help you address. Least of all Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024).
That Garland’s fourth feature should be so widely hailed as a “vital” (The Film Stage), “powerful” (Variety), and, yes, “important” (the Los Angeles Times) film is nothing surprising, considering how many have pegged it as a cautionary tale. Civil War sets its titular conflict in the United States, wherein a dictatorial President (Nick Offerman) is wrestling with a two-front insurgency. In a bid to oust him, Texas and California have united as the “Western Forces,” while Florida has launched its own secessionist campaign. Now in his third term, the President has disbanded the FBI and ordered military strikes against civilians; across a wasteland of war-torn cities, the Western Forces are inching closer to Washington; chaos and bloodshed reign supreme. Guiding us through the horrors is a group of four journalists determined to snatch the scoop of the century and interview the POTUS before his all but inevitable downfall: veteran Reuters photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst), her longtime reporter colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), novice photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a writer for “what’s left of the New York Times.”
Civil War (Alex Garland, 2024).
I can’t rally behind those who, like John Fink at the Film Stage, see the film as “a stunning warning,” that “no matter what the cause, war is hell”—largely because I’m not too sure, in 2024, that’s anything particularly groundbreaking. But there’s no denying the kind of shock Civil War elicits through the dislocation of full-throttle warfare onto the domestic front, nor the distressingly small distance that separates Garland’s dystopia from the country’s real-life state of near insurrection (43 percent of Americans, per a 2022 survey by the Economist and YouGov, think a civil war is likely within the next decade). “If the violence feels more intense than in a typical genre shoot ’em up,” Manhola Dargis writes at the New York Times, “it’s also because with ‘Civil War,’ Garland has made the movie that’s long been workshopped in American political discourse and in mass culture, and which entered wider circulation on Jan. 6.” The visceral power of Garland’s dystopia “unquestionably owes much to the vivid scenes that beamed across the world that day when rioters, some wearing T-shirts emblazoned with ‘MAGA civil war,’ swarmed the Capitol.”
Garland has amplified those frictions into a full-blown armed conflict, and by importing images of destruction that Americans would normally see broadcasted from far-flung places, the film “is designed as a shock to the system,” Rocco T. Thompson observes at Slant, “to remind an apathetic and increasingly bloodthirsty populace that if we keep pushing hard enough, we’ll become another example of how democracies die, and a warning for other nations going down a similar path.” That what-if-it-happened-here approach might go some way toward explaining the baffling marketing strategy adopted by the film’s studio, A24, which has included AI-generated ads and posters with shots of ravaged US cities that did not feature anywhere in the actual film. Be that as it may, the effect Civil War triggers is one of “moral immediacy,” Dana Stevens argues at Slate. As Garland envisions the horror as a homegrown malaise—a disease as pernicious as the virus responsible for the uncanny genetic mutations of his Annihilation (2018)—“suddenly it’s impossible to exoticize or otherwise alienate ourselves from the bloodshed onscreen, which makes us ask ourselves what we were doing exoticizing it in the first place.”
“Every time I survived a war zone,” Dunst’s Lee ponders in a rare moment of respite (and an even rarer moment of introspection), “I thought I was sending a warning home: ‘Don’t do this.’ But here we are.” Perhaps Garland “naively hopes the same,” Amy Nicholson wonders at the Washington Post, “which is why he’s avoided the real-world polarization behind this conflict so his gory warning will be watched by as many Americans as possible.” Indeed, the film’s reticence to take a side or spell out its characters’ allegiances might well be Civil War’s most singular gambit. Garland doesn’t provide any clues as to the rebellion’s origins, the warring parties’ political affiliations, or the reason such unlikely inter-state alliances have come into being. Which is not to say the film is in any way “surprisingly apolitical,” as Matthew Monagle claims at The Playlist; in fact, there seems to be a strident clash between what’s articulated aloud and whatever real-world associations we might project onto these characters and the wasteland they traverse. After all, Garland’s painstaking efforts to make sure we can’t graft his imagined civil war onto the real one that devastated the country in the late 19th century (hence the far-fetched red-state/blue-state coalition) are a deliberately political gesture, and it’s not like the film is uniformly ambiguous about its present-day echoes (Offerman’s quip that his administration’s triumph over the rebels is already been hailed by many as “the greatest victory in the history of mankind” gives him more than a whiff of Trump).
Civil War (Alex Garland, 2024).
If anything, what Lee and friends amble their way into is a post-ideological wasteland where debates over politics have been rendered moot by violence, and people reduced to gun-toting bipeds with all the psychological intricacy of amoebae (how else to define background characters who operate in the most rudimentary “someone’s trying to kill us [and] we’re trying to kill them” logic?). Depending on how you feel about its fence-sitting neutrality, the film’s refusal to reveal anything meaningful about the conflict might be “a deeply smart move,” Robbie Collin notes at The Telegraph: “if given a rationale, we’d only end up siding with or against it,” while “what Garland wants us to ponder is what his film blasts at us with relentless and uncompromising tension and style: a vision of a self-inflicted, and ultimately also self-willed, national collapse.” After all, Bilge Ebiri asks at Vulture, “does any sane person really want a version of this film that attempts to spell out these people’s politics or, even worse, takes sides in its fictional conflict?”
Garland does include flashes of real news footage from a variety of recent American disturbances, but he’s clearly done more research into media depictions of other countries’ war zones. This is maybe his best idea, and why the film’s lack of political context feels more pointed than spineless: The conceit here is to depict Americans acting the way we’ve seen people act in other international conflicts, be it Vietnam or Lebanon or the former Yugoslavia or Iraq or Gaza or… well, the list goes on. In that sense, Civil War winds up becoming a movie about itself. Beyond the plausibility of war in the United States or the tragedy of such an eventuality, it’s about the way we refuse to let images from wars like this get to us. It’s more a call for reflection, an attempt to put us in the shoes of others, than a warning—not an It Can Happen Here movie, but a Here’s What It’s Like movie. It doesn’t want to make us feel so much as it wants us to ask why we don’t feel anything.
Civil War (Alex Garland, 2024).
So far, so true: Garland’s film isn’t concerned with diagnosing the root causes of the bloodbath so much as dissecting those who must record it and make sense of their roles as creators and disseminators of those acts of witnessing. Which is another way of saying that Civil War is a film about journalism, and the ethics that correspondents must negotiate under extreme physical and psychological duress. “Specifically, and most originally,” Matt Zoller Seitz writes at RogerEbert.com,
"Civil War" is a portrait of the mentality of pure reporters, the types of people who are less interested in explaining what things "mean" (in the manner of an editorial writer or "pundit") than in getting the scoop before the competition, by any means necessary. Whether the scoop takes the form of a written story, a TV news segment, or a still photo that wins a Pulitzer, the quest for the scoop is an end unto itself, and it's bound up with the massive dopamine hit that comes from putting oneself in harm's way. The kinds of obsessive war correspondents who rarely come back to their own countries don't care about the real-world impact of the political realities encoded within the epic violence they chronicle, or else compartmentalize it to stay focused.
Which strikes me as a depressingly reductive précis of the profession, especially as embodied by the two legendary war correspondents Dunst’s Lee is modeled after: Lee Miller, the pioneering photographer responsible for some of the most iconic shots of the twentieth century (including those of the liberation of the concentration camps at Dachau and Buchenwald), and Marie Colvin, the American journalist for the Sunday Times who was killed while covering the siege of Homs, Syria, in 2012. The psychological vacuity of Garland’s reporters is less a professional hazard than a testament to the director’s inability to probe further into their emotional makeup. “We take pictures so others can ask these questions,” Lee muses, but in a journey she shares with three other people (two of them reporters, people who must care about the epic violence they chronicle and the real-world impact of their accounts), doesn’t anyone have anything meaningful to say about the events they witness? To boot, if the internet and most of the nation’s communication networks are in tatters, how exactly will these photos and articles be distributed, and who will they reach? For all of Civil War’s appeals to anachronistic journalistic practices, the only forms of media we’re privy to are those freeze-frame photos. At the same time, A. S. Hamrah posits in an illuminating read over at The Forum, “the invisibility of contemporary digital media lets the news media off the hook. If media contributed to the polarization that led to this civil war, this film leaves that out.”
Civil War (Alex Garland, 2024).
Such silence, I suspect, speaks to a much larger concern: Garland’s unwillingness to thoroughly explore the relationship between his increasingly shell-shocked quartet and the images they capture en route. Time and again, the director designs sequences as if through the viewfinders of Lee and Jessie’s cameras, which often end in freeze-frames depicting the pictures they snap. If Civil War’s ultimate subject is the creation of images, then Garland “offers no more reflection about his characters’ […] than he does about his own,” Richard Brody writes at the New Yorker.
He films war and horror without inhibition, squeamishness, or self-questioning about the appropriateness of style, form, tone, or substance; he aims only for effect, and does so shamelessly, although I, as a viewer, was at times ashamed for him. Much of the violence is filmed in ways that are crudely manipulative and vulgarly thrill-stoking […] Such picturesque and emotionally juiced renderings of violence and horror give the movie a pornographic air. Pornography succeeds by gratifying a universal itch, and “Civil War” seems bent on something similar—relying on ingrained fascination with fantasies of violence to attract viewers. It does so thoughtlessly, however, not to make people consider realities that violent fantasies imply but simply to stoke excitement and create a captive audience for his point of view.
This is the morbid curiosity those AI-generated posters and ads were trying to stoke; to borrow again from Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri, Civil War “both revels in and abhors our fascination with the idea of America as a battlefield.” And though critics have often pointed to Garland’s background as a video-game writer to account for his films’ first-person-shooter aesthetics (among other things, the director has co-written a few reboots of the Devil May Cry franchise, and the post-apocalyptic Enslaved: Odyssey to the West), Civil War’s own drifters often come across as non-player characters from a gruesome fantasia à la Call of Duty. “Civil War’s skittishness toward real-world allusion might be more tolerable, if still frustrating, had the film at least fleshed out its characters,” Richard Lawson contends at Vanity Fair.
To make up for a deliberately underdeveloped environment, the people moving through it could be designed to hold our attention. Yet Garland takes half measures there, too. Everyone is awfully opaque. We know that Lee is talented but weary, Jessie overly eager, Moura and Henderson’s characters stand on different ends of the adrenaline-junkie spectrum. We learn nothing about the motivation behind their work; their social dynamic is faintly mapped. They remain strangers to us, and so do their professions. (It is also curious that this film is so concerned with still photography; video cameras of any variety are barely seen in the film.) We eventually stop caring about what happens to these people; only the most basic and innate empathy remains.
Civil War (Alex Garland, 2024).
Perhaps then, as Stephanie Zacharek argues over at Time, rather than the year’s most important or vital film, Civil War is just frustratingly unimaginative, a vision telegraphed from a not-so-unlikely future that could have made for a thought-provoking journey (for both sides of the political spectrum), and instead settled for a far triter ride.
The country we call the United States is dangerously fractured right now, and anyone who denies it has their head in the sand. That should make Alex Garland’s Civil War the perfect movie for our times. Instead, it’s just the most obvious one. Set in a country torn to ribbons, Garland’s movie is calculated to be powerful, chilling, alarmingly prescient—you can almost see the advertising pull quotes writing themselves. But there’s a difference between a movie with depth and one that pedals hard to convince us how deep it is. That’s the kind of movie Civil War is: one that invents a nightmare-on-earth scenario and takes great pains to portray it as realistically as possible, with the aim of jolting us to attention. The horrors mount—a pit filled with dead bodies, a character executed point-blank for no reason beyond cruelty. And still, somehow, it adds up to so little. We all want movies with vision, but what kind of vision are we willing to settle for, and why?