For coming up on seven months now, we’ve been seeing horrifying brutal images of the atrocities being carried out in Gaza. A world away we’ve seen the bodies, the famine, the missile drops, the devastation. If you have any kind of a heart it has been broken by this. And much of it has come courtesy of journalists and photographers intrepidly communicating those horrors for the world to see. War photography is vital in a world of mass media, and indeed related to this present crisis has had a tangible effect -without it you can be sure Israel wouldn’t be as diplomatically isolated as it currently is. But there’s something quintessentially disturbing about war photography too. About going into lethal crisis zones simply to witness carnage. And we don’t talk enough about how traumatizing that is. Or what it means for one’s humanity to power through it.
This is what is unexpectedly at the centre of Alex Garland’s Civil War -a film that imagines a second factional war in the United States in the near future. It is a morbid idea, and one that seemingly plays into the unhinged fantasies of certain American extremists (including some in Congress) about an impending armed conflict as the culmination of increased partisan polarization in that country. But Garland isn’t interested in exploiting modern ideological tensions -it’s why he casts California and Texas (two generally politically oppositional states) as a united front. Rather he’s focally compelled by the concept as a situation in which to psychologically examine combat journalism. After all, when people talk about what a theoritical modern American Civil War would look like, they likely don’t consider so much what the ‘look’ really means.
The exact image of this war-torn America is intentionally vague. What can be gathered is that at some point in the relatively near future the country is divided into about three or four political/military factions in response to a nameless President (Nick Offerman) who somehow managed to give himself a third term in office. There’s reference to his authoritarianism, his ordering of drone strikes on American civilians, but whatever the specifics a seceded Western Forces is now fighting their way through the continental U.S. towards deposing the President in Washington.
In the midst of this is Lee (Kirsten Dunst), a celebrated photojournalist covering the ground offensive with her reporter colleague Joel (Wagner Moura). Their goal, as the Western Forces close in, is to get to Washington themselves to interview and photograph the President. Taking a dangerous road through the eastern states, accompanied by their veteran mentor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and an aspiring war photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), they witness the combat and horrifying effects of the war on various fronts.
Garland shoots it as an especially grounded war movie -each scene of conflict is framed like something you might see on a news broadcast covering a war zone. On more than one occasion I was reminded of The Killing Fields or The Year of Living Dangerously more than any conventional dystopia flick. But the precise curious thing about these aesthetics, and no doubt the reason why Garland chose them, is that they have rarely if ever been portrayed in the context of warin the United States. We see Lee following an armed crisis in Brooklyn, duck for cover with soldiers at a Midwestern university campus, wander through a classic American suburbia patrolled by armed guards. Along their journey they maneuver through a road of empty abandoned vehicles, sleep near a downed helicopter at a shopping centre parking lot, visit an aid camp in a football stadium. And for a westerner, it throws your mind to see very specific (sometimes very loaded) signs of chaos and devastation against familiar American backdrops. One of the keenest observations many have noted about the film is that it envisions America the way American cinema so often envisions the Middle East: with a sense of foreign-ness (Garland is of course British), and a lot of generic motifs to its culture blown up beyond necessary proportion -this is especially true of the scene in a very Norman Rockwell small town.
Covering it with a similar level of alienation are the journalists, maintaining a level of distance and objectivity as best they can in the midst of the unimaginable. Their neutrality protects them, but it also damages them. "Once you start asking questions you don't stop," Lee tells Jessie at one point. "We record so other people ask." And Lee has gotten very good at not asking, taking in every incident with seemingly only mild curiosity, simply taking photos of the violence rather than making any steps to stop it. Where does this sort of work start chipping away at the soul, or more disturbingly render someone inert to human suffering? These are the questions Garland provokes in his audience. Lee shoots as much as the soldiers, and hers can be just as dehumanizing, condensing lives to mere record. There is a danger Garland fears in our own antipathy to the violence, our ability to get used to it -and we see the full disturbing context of this in the climax with one of the grimmest of pay-offs.
Dunst performs with a searing coldness this strategic inhumanity, but while she and Garland interrogate it seriously, they also demonstrate a clear and consciously contradictory respect for combat journalists and what they have to go through both physically and psychologically. Lee is clearly a tragedy, Jessie may be one too. And even if it is questionable how much they believe in their purpose anymore, that purpose is still seen to be very important. Joel and Sammy at least aren't so foregone, even as they too have been blunted by their experiences. Whatever else it may say about them, the movie isn't cynical towards journalists -their commitment to truth is emphatic.
Part of that truth that Garland expresses sharply is the dull reductionism of war; the film's attitude probably best represented by a scene at an abandoned Christmas pavilion. As soldiers crouch in the brush aiming to take out a sniper, they admit they don't know whose side he is on -but he's firing at them so they're firing back. Earlier, Lee and Jessie witness a horrific display near a gas station that again has nothing to do with greater politically motivating factors behind the war and is more just a symbol of the collapse of civil order. Of course the most pronounced instance of this is a viscerally intense show-stopping confrontation with a small unit of soldiers led by an uncredited Jesse Plemons covering up a war crime. They are a racist, xenophobic bunch, yes -but they aren't identified with any specific party in play.
Still, while the movie is not about Republicans vs. Democrats, right vs. left, it is not apolitical by any means either, despite what some might accuse it of. There's an occasional fleck of implication to Offerman's little-seen but very rhetorically brazen President, a reference to an "Antifa Massacre" (evidently in Garland's future an ideological stance is still misrepresented as an organized front), and of course the stereotypes in character of that aforementioned militia. But these are ultimately minor things next to the far more troubling commentary extolled by the way the U.S. is more broadly framed by the movie. Civil War is highly critical of America's inherently violent character, as we see the iconography and effects of that violence applied to itself for a change. Some of this insight by Garland's admission, is derived from January 6th, but it is also clearly built off a myriad of sources both domestic to the U.S. and international. Scenes of Washington enveloped in smoke and sirens, lit the way another movie might illustrate Kabul, as tanks and soldiers close in on the White House -there's no more coarse and damning an image of American exceptionalism brought to a kneel. The sobriety of the final shot and what it evokes sets out to disturb viewers of any political stripe.
And that is something across three films Garland has demonstrated a potent proficiency in. Civil War is his subtlest but it may also be his most effective. Bolstered by strong pointed direction and an array of excellent performances from as well as Dunst, Moura and Henderson, and especially Spaeny and Plemons, Civil War is a timely, unsettling impression of social collapse and desolation filtered through a challenging examination of the ethics and trauma of combat journalism and a powerful screed (and warning) against violent American hegemony.
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