As a reluctant prophet of a second US civil war, operating in the realm of fiction, I felt obligated to see Alex Garland’s “Civil War.” On the surface, it’s a stark if didactic reminder of what such a war would mean in practice for ordinary Americans: torturing guys you went to high school with, refugee camps in West Virginia; haggling with armed gas station locals for the privilege of paying $300 Canadian (not US!) for a half-tank of precious gas; air strikes on dozens of cars abandoned in the roadway, their occupants presumably dead. Surely Americans don’t want that? We’ve gotten used to watching such chaos at a detached distance in the last 160 years, for sure.
The putative plotline is that four journalists are on a roundabout journey to get from NY to Washington to interview the President before the secessionist Western Forces reach him. This allows them to transit West Virginia, home of unpredictable and cinematic Red masses. A slightly more compelling story line is that an aspiring young war journalist, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), attaches herself to the three war-journalism veterans on the trip: her heroine the famous Lee (Kirsten Dunst); vaguely Hispanic Joel from Florida (Wagner Moura), and Sammy, an aged African-American heavyset fount of common sense (Stephen McKinley Henderson). The threesome instruct Jessie in the ways of war journalism, and physically protect her, throughout the movie.
But combining all these elements makes for a more profound story: the veteran photojournalists who navigate foreign mayhem and evil with aplomb have a harder time maintaining their detachment when war comes to their own shores and they become targets and victims themselves. The magic word “Press” is honored more by the warring Third World foreigners than by once-fellow Americans who see every other American as a potential enemy.
A lot has been made of Garland’s choice to obscure the identities of the government versus the secessionist side. “Look, Texas and California are on the same side!” As others have noted, this maintains the largest possible audience base and does not allow one political side the opportunity to dismiss the film outright as the propaganda of the other. It also advances the simplest narrative of “don’t start a civil war! Look how awful it would be and how we would all suffer!” Or as our president recently warned, “Don’t!”
Not going to argue with that, although interestingly the pre-war peace of one eerily silent town the journalists pass through, exclaiming “time warp!” is explained by snipers on the roof. Second Amendment at work. Lee tries on a dress in a shop. The scene possibly is meant to convey the life she might have led had she not been chasing warring foreigners, but it is Jessie, the newcomer, who actually buys one. Read into that what you will.
However, those of us skilled in the ways of the leftwing media can see the tropes peeking through. If you give lefties enough rope, or scope, they will eventually reveal themselves because they are largely unaware of and unable to resist their own fetishes. The multiracial harmony of the refugee camp, where a longhaired young white man reads to admiring children. Enforced collectivism can be fun and educational! The multiracial but mostly non-threatening pleading mob, beaten by the NYPD in the opening sequence. Lee covers Jessie protectively against the backdrop of an NYPD cruiser sporting the force motto, “Courtesy, Professionalism, Respect.” Ha ha, how ironic. The mediocre white male president, in his third term in office, is seen at the beginning of the movie in a deliberately fuzzy, alienating video. The evillest of all the combatants the journalists encounter, a very blond and xenophobic man in mirrored shades, quizzes them on their home states, in what becomes a matter of life and death. Meanwhile, another soldier pours lime into a big trench of murdered bodies. Hmm, World War II, anyone?
The film is likely to receive an Academy nomination for cinematography. The ability to integrate the still shots of the photojournalists during the key action scenes holds various dramatic camera shots from the movie in the viewers’ eyes for a few amberish moments longer than normally would be the case. The refugee camp at night is cast in a warm yellow glow as folks try to do normal things like play cards. There are dreamy falling-star sky and other 60’s style filters juxtaposed against at least two shots—a death and an escape from a grisly pit—that border on exploitative. If the juxtapositions are meant to convey a message, it escaped me.
The refusal to engage seriously with clashing ideas is what makes the movie more of a fable than a serious drama, unless you hew to one of the journalist-centered storylines. Every civil war in the Western world has been a clash of ideologies, which Garland, an Englishman, presumably knows. Cavaliers versus Roundheads, states rights versus federalism, Huguenots versus Catholics, slavery versus abolitionism, colonial rule versus independence, and even communism versus modernizing czardom. No one smashes constitutional, institutional, and moral restraints to the kind of chaos seen in Civil War unless they think their liberty and their way of life are at stake and that the restraints are no longer viable. We never argue whether these civil wars were necessary, except as a parlor game exercise.
I will not spoil the end for you who might see the movie, but let’s say the end of the film gives both US political extremes a dollop of satisfaction, if those sides are the ones I think they are. It’s worth seeing, if you can tolerate relatively high levels of violence and ambiguity. Four stars if you can, three stars if you can’t. My husband, a man of The Angry Middle, as he calls himself, gave it one star, calling it “an empty shell.” A partial antidote to the film is One Life, which valorizes the late Nicholas Winton’s rescue of almost 700 Jewish Czech refugee children in 1939 Prague. It is much more sentimental and straightforward. (Civil War, 2024, 1 hour 49 minutes).