 |
| Images courtesy of A24 |
Something that isn’t discussed enough is just how large the land mass is in the United States. To drive from the east coast to the west coast would take about six days of continuous travel. Some states, like Texas, are so large that you can spend an entire day just trying to get out of the state. While there is a baseline “American experience” traveling to a different state can feel like visiting a different country complete with differing attitudes and ideologies.
The premise of Alex Garland’s Civil War is an undefined future where the US has separated into four factions due to a sitting president who has instituted a dictatorship. The narrative isn’t concerned with details, and it drip feeds information infrequently with most of the exposition left up to the audience to figure out from visuals. For the duration of the film, it follows four war photojournalists: Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), Joel (Wagner Moira), Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). Lee, Joel, and Sammy are veteran reporters who have been covering conflicts for years, but Jessie is young and new to the field.
As the four journalists travel across the US to DC to interview the president and see the front lines, they encounter various pockets of conflicts and situations as each area has responded differently to the war. Lee and Jessie share a tenuous friendship as Jessie looks up to Lee as a mentor and Lee sees her younger self in Jesse. The film explores the kind of intestinal fortitude required to be present and record atrocities and the reporters have to stay impartial observers as a defense mechanism from all of the pain and suffering they see.
Despite the subjective nature of photography (it is an art, after all), journalism is supposed to be the closest we can get to an objective eye on events. Civil War isn’t really an “apolitical” film, because it is at the end of the day depicting a war. However, the point-of-view of the narrative is through the journalists who have to keep themselves an arm’s distance from it. They are human and cannot fully keep their emotions out of it but that’s the goal.
Therefore the lens the audience sees is removed from the nuance, and the ideologies are not in sharp focus. They are there if you pay attention: a ditch full of dead non-white bodies, rich suburban areas that have the luxury to watch the war unfold on television while they live a “normal” life, fly-over states geographically distant from the fray, the president taking a third term and disbanding the FBI (Google Project 2025). This film has more in common with dystopian sci-fi than actual war films but it could be harder to recognize it because our reality is quickly catching up to the speculation.
Another idea in the film is that while you are in a war “sides” really don’t have a meaning in the thick of it. In a car ride at the beginning Lee says: “We record so other people ask the questions.” They aren’t there to make a statement they are there to capture images. Later on they ask a couple of soldiers “What are your orders?” and they curtly reply “That guy is trying to kill us and we are trying to kill him”. It’s chaos, no time to sort it out till afterwards, until the fog of war clears.
This is not a film that pulls punches. But ultimately it’s not a film about war, it’s a film about who records the war. The action is shot with urgency and panache, complete with stunning cinematography and incredible composition. The violence is brutal and occasionally beautiful, death as art, often captured in camera snapshots. Civil War transitions from a character piece to an action film rather quickly, perhaps too quickly, bombarding the senses. The script could have used an extra pass or two as some of the dialogue feels stilted and awkward, but when the film is going full tilt, it is engrossing and harrowing in equal measure.
There is too much focus why there’s a civil war when the war isn’t the point of the movie. It’s actually about journalism and more so recording history. Being a witness. Telling a story that the dead can’t tell.
—Michelle Kisner