I went into Alex Garland's latest film, "Civil War," about a fictional modern day American Civil War, deeply skeptical. Recent films trying to comment on the American left/right cultural divide like "The Hunt" and "Don't Look Up" haven't turned out very well, usually coming off as either toothless or ham handed in the extreme. I wasn't looking forward to another potentially incendiary piece of satire in the middle of an election year. However, "Civil War" isn't a satire, and isn't too keen on taking sides.
From the outset, "Civil War" has no interest in the specifics of any political ideologies. The three-term American president, played by Nick Offerman, is clearly a Trump analog, but we don't know if he's a Democrat, Republican, Libertarian, or something else. The United States has fractured into several different factions. Texas and California have joined forces, against the authoritarian regime running Washington DC. Our POV characters are a group of journalists and war photographers who decide to take a very dangerous trip to Washington D.C. to interview the president. Lee (Kirsten Dunst), her colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), and her mentor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) plan to drive from New York City to the front lines in Virginia. At the last minute they're joined by an aspiring young photographer named Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), who is a fan of Lee's.
The group encounters dangerous situations, one after another. Society has broken down in many areas, so there are an awful lot of gun-toting, paranoid, would-be combatants everywhere, who don't answer to anyone, and have taken matters into their own hands. Our protagonists are able to defuse some of these bad encounters, but not all of them. Again and again they find people who cannot be reasoned with - who can only be dealt with by flattery, bribery, or the threat of harm. Because Garland doesn't let us choose sides, the viewer is forced to confront the acts of the violence as presented - soldiers carrying out an execution, looters being tortured, and a pair of racist militiamen who simply shoot whoever they don't like. Jessie's improvement as a photographer directly correlates to her becoming more and more desensitized to the horrors around her.
For an Alex Garland film, there's relatively little plot. We watch Lee's group travel down the Eastern seaboard, collecting stories and photos, and reach Washington just as the situation there reaches a critical point, so we have a big action finale. Garland seems more interested in maintaining an atmosphere of chaos and dread. The use of music is key, such as a De La Soul needle drop during the execution scene, and Christmas tunes backing a sniper sequence. The characters are thinly drawn, but the whole cast is strong, and I enjoyed their performances. Dunst, Moura, and McKinley have always been dependably great onscreen, and Cailee Spaeny is certainly on the right track.
Very late in the film, I considered that Garland might be criticizing the media through the actions of Lee's team. However, it's so ambiguous that I'm not sure this was the intention. Frankly, there's a lot that you could read into "Civil War," but every attempt I made to try and dissect the film left me feeling like I was grasping at straws. I understand what it's trying to do, and its aims are admirable on paper, but without a stronger thematic throughline, a lot of it feels muddled and unfocused. The scenarios that Garland comes up with, and his treatment of the subject matter are all very good. The action scenes in particular are very grounded and not sensationalized, often using low lighting and tight POV shots. This is reportedly the most expensive A24 film to date, and the money was well spent.
However, I couldn't help feeling in the end that I was missing something. Surely this wasn't all the film wanted to say, was it? Showing us realistic modern warfare happening in the United States is not a new idea, and though the execution is very good, it's just not as shocking or compelling as I'd hoped. I wonder if the film would've hit harder if I'd recognized any of the locations on the trip, or if we'd spent time with people other than the neutral reporters. I know the particulars of this alternate universe aren't the point, but leaving them out just makes me want to know more - similar to the premise of "The Purge" being way more interesting than the fairly typical home invasion movie it created an excuse for. "Civil War" is a fine movie, but doesn't feel like it lived up to its potential.
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