Civil War, more so than anything else, is an anti-war film, but it’s one of the few with the guts to acknowledge that human beings will never exist in a post-war society. Sure, we can increase amount of time between wars or, as is the current m.o. of the military industrial complex, redefine war entirely, but the fact of the matter is that as long as at least two human beings are stuck in one location (or 8 billion are stuck on one planet), conflict will emerge. It’s as natural as eating a meal. This is why it’s been fascinating to watch the reaction to the film’s advertising campaign, which has managed to pull a fast one on all of us. Or, to be more accurate, it weaponized our own inclination roward conflict in order to get us to pull a fast one on ourselves.
“Is Alex Garland *really* the right person to tell a story about contemporary America?”
“Do we really need something that stokes these fires during an election year?”
“In what world would California and Texas be on the same political team?!?”
Well, to put it frankly: a fictional one.
So much handwringing over what the film could potentially posit as the reason for America to enter a second civil war, and as it turns out, Alex Garland’s masterful script doesn’t even touch it. The divide across the American populace is just part of the setting, and as such, the thematic material contained within this brilliant thriller is less concerned with looking at American politics and more concerned with looking at human beings themselves.
The film begins with the President (Nick Offerman) rehearsing a speech in which he plans to declare a decisive victory over the Western Front, a secessionist/insurrectionist army made up of Texas and California. He uses the dubious “people are saying” qualifier that sounds sourced but is really a meaningless phrase. He tries on many faces as he rehearses, and doesn’t seem pleased with any of them. One gets the sense that he has no clue about the actual status of the union — he’s just here to sell cars.
We then meet Lee (Kirsten Dunst, giving the finest performance of her career), a legendary photojournalist who found success by getting up close and personal with the worst humanity has to offer. She’s seen countless wars and more death than most could comprehend. She and her reporter colleague Joel (Wagner Moura) plan to traverse the war torn roads of the American east coast in the hopes of interviewing the President. Tagging along are veteran reporter Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and a very young photographer named Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), the latter of whom Lee sees as dead weight and unnecessary responsibility. Joel, on the other hand, welcomes the hungry upstart journalist, seeing in her the same energy that he and Lee exhibited at the start of their own careers. Still, it’s a dangerous road, and while their press passes grant them some protection, there are absolutely no guarantees of safety.
What follows is essentially a road movie, which sees our foursome of protagonists experiencing the culture of war from a variety of perspectives. They move through battlefields, encounter militias and aid workers, and scrap with civilians, some of whom have embraced the chaos, while others prefer to wash their hands of the whole thing, all while trying to get to DC quickly, lest they be beaten to a presidential interview by any of the other journalists on the same path. As members of the press, a level of detachment is required. Per Lee’s stated objective, they’re not here to editorialize, but rather to document what’s happening and let the populace come to their own decisions based on what they see. Yet Lee struggles with this notion. The introduction of a camera results in automatic editorialization — “that’s a good image,” she tells Jessie when they stumble across a crashed military helicopter in a J.C. Penney parking lot. When Jessie asks Lee if she’d take a picture of her corpse if she happened to die, Lee responds, “what do you think?”
It’s clear that Lee sees herself in Jessie’s youthful naivety. It’s also clear that as much as she’d like to be an inspirational figure, leading a teenager into a profoundly dangerous career has her feeling another type of way. Add to that the creeping notion that for all the notable photos she’s published over the years, it seems little has changed. People are going to fight. Two people can look at a photo of a corpse and see it two different, polar opposite ways. Is journalistic detachment essential, or is it limiting?
These are just a few of the many thematic ideas being explored by Garland’s dense, thoughtful script, but rather than taking big swings of exposition, it’s the little details that do the heavy lifting. One notable scene finds Lee and Jessie face to face with a group of men who run a gas station. They sit out front with rifles, drunk on the power that comes with having something people need. Absent the proper paperwork to purchase fuel, Lee offers them $300 dollars cash. One man scoffs.
“300 will get you a sandwich. Ham or cheese.”
But when Lee lets on that it’s $300 in Canadian currency, his tune changes. A clever detail indeed.
Behind the gas station we find that the men have taken prisoner of a duo of looters, both of whom have been strung up and tortured for days. Their captor makes note that one of the looters was a former classmate of his; a classmate who never paid him any mind. In this moment it’s clear that the terms of the war are irrelevant. For this young man (who may or may not have been wearing Philadelphia Eagles swag — I need to get a closer look when I see it again WHICH I WILL) the war is an excuse to exorcise personal demons with little consequence.
If divorced from the deeply resonant thematic material, Civil War would still deliver an exciting white-knuckle thriller. Garland’s skills behind the camera are as impressive as his skills with a pen (okay, okay, word processor). He very purposefully makes the combat sequences feel like something we’d see in a war documentary, or in news footage, but with the added percussiveness of tremendous sound design. Every bullet that whizzes by feels tangible, and more than a few sudden moments of combat unintentionally function as jump scares. The handful of people I know who have experienced combat have all said the same thing: the sustained tension that comes from the knowledge that chaos could erupt at any moment, which could furthermore mean your death, makes it impossible to unclench your clenchables. The degree that a movie can create such a feeling is limited, but it hits its max here. It is far from a relaxing night at the movies.
I’m addition to the onslaught of combat footage, Garland often injects a freeze frame representative of the photographs that Lee and Jessie are snapping amidst the calamity of war. It simultaneously ingratiates the viewer into the action and keeps us at a distance — in the exact space the journalists wish to occupy.
But for all the thematic material synthesized into the story and the imagery, and for all the stuff that I surely missed after just a single viewing of this dense, deceptively complicated film, what sticks in my memory most is the way it takes the familiar imagery of documented combat and puts it on American soil. We’re so used to seeing it in foreign locales, and so used to the privilege of comfort that comes with being an American, that to see armed combat happening in a distinctly American landscape is deeply terrifying. And really, just because that sort of thing doesn’t happen here doesn’t mean it can’t. War, in the mind of the American, is over there. Civil War brings it here. War is hell, and hell can spring up wherever humans reside, even at home.
Oh, and if you can see it in IMAX, do.
Directed by Alex Garland
Written by Alex Garland
Starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson
Rated R, 109 minutes
