Civil War (A24) - So Close, And Yet So Far · 8:55pm April 21st
Okay, so I watched A24's Civil War last Wednesday. How much of what I predicted here came true? As it turns out, I was wrong on a couple of points, but right on many others, with one particular stand-out panning out worse than I expected.
This is as much a short review of the movie as it is a plot breakdown, so there will be spoilers past a certain point, which I shall mark in the journal. Should you plan to watch Civil War and don't wish to have your viewing experience ruined, read what is written below, then stop at the mark. Your choice as to whether you come back to read the rest afterwards.
There's no denying that, in many regards, Civil War is an accomplished movie. I am sure that Alex Garland made the movie he wanted to make.
What I have to ask is if the movie should have been more.
Set in a near-future USA, Civil War follows the road trip of four American journalists; Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), a famous yet world-weary war photographer, who along with her hot-shot colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), their elderly mentor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and novice photojournalist Jessie (Cailee Speaney) embarks on a dangerous journey to Washington D.C., capital of the war-torn country, where seditious military forces prepare to close in on the dictatorial President of the United States. Their plan, insofar as they even have one, is to land a final interview with the President before he gets captured and, presumably, executed by the Western Forces.
Right out of the gate, it's worth making something clear; Civil War is not an action movie, at least not in the way early trailers portrayed it as. There are action setpieces, yet the action is wholly boots-to-the-ground, with an emphasis on tension, as our protagonists are unarmed civilians who can only hope to survive and document the war. Per the writer-director's own commentary, Civil War follows the best tradition of cinematic works like Come And See or Apocalypse Now in that it deserves to be treated more as a horror movie, and not simply because of a scenario which brings sights that Western viewers are accustomed to think of as happening "over there" right on our doorsteps.
In fact, the movie purposefully avoids providing context on why America is at war with itself. The Texas-California alliance which the trailers drew attention to is set-dressing; in the film proper, the "Western Forces" only serve as the strongest faction who are opposed to the President and his loyalists.
And this, right there, will inform whether you feel Civil War does a good job or not, beyond its technical mastery.
Garland's aim isn't to set up a plausible civil-war scenario in the United States, but to draw upon the imagery commonly associated with "overseas" wars and apply them to a Western country. This point is underlined by Kirsten Dunst's character during her first few scenes, where a suicide-bombing by a runner brandishing the Stars-and-Stripes gets followed up with a flashback of Lee photographing war crimes in Africa and the Middle East. As quoted by the trailers;
"Every time I survived a warzone, I thought I was sending a warning home. 'Don’t do this'. Yet here we are."
However, despite its American setting, and the American nationality of its journalistic protagonists, they continue to approach this war just as they would any other; pictures to be taken, from a detached perspective, so the story may be told. Each of the four leads represents a different stage of the dangerous life these characters lead. Jessie is the aspiring newcomer, a rookie yet to cut her teeth on the traumatic realities of her job. Joel and Lee are contrasting facets of what she might become, the adrenaline junkie and jaded professional, respectively. And Sammy is the end of the road, the old sage who's survived long enough to attain wisdom about what lies ahead.
The performances are great, the cinematography is wonderful, the action scenes some of the few to have stimulated my adrenal gland in a long time. Credit for that last part should go to the sound design, which makes gunfire sound threatening as movies seldom do.
For all of that, would I recommend Civil War? I'm not sure I would.
Alex Garland set out to make an "apolitical" movie about an American Civil War. On paper, the endeavour sounds noble enough, an intended reminder that war makes bastards of us all. Even the journalists are not exempt from this; although the most sympathetically-depicted characters, the emotional detachment they need to do their jobs is treated as a further symptom of dehumanisation. The causes which led to a war are often lost on the people living it. While the alliance of Texas and California is an element that has attracted much derision, I'm inclined to see a deliberate move here by the writer to prevent ascribing any specific politics to the factions, other than opposition to a generically "fascist" President.
The movie's problem is that its own reluctance to make a political statement ends up being a political statement.
I think the greatest symptom of this artificiality is to be found in the characters' improbable level of remove from the conflict. Civil War suffers from a similar issue as Hulu's adaptation of The Handmaid's Tale; however well-intentioned its attempt to show that "It could happen here", the viewer's subconscious will be whispering that such an event would be covered differently in a Western nation. At a number of intervals, our heroes make mention of family members who are staying away from the conflict, pretending it isn't happening. I kept waiting for someone to say they were pretending this wasn't happening even before the war. They never did.
I've read at least one article which posits that Civil War simply moves the boundaries of the middle-class American public's attitude on bloody foreign conflicts further inland, now within America's borders, yet still coming from a hermetically-sealed perspective. As Garland appropriates the familiar imagery of warfare in regions of the world like Kosovo, Mali or Syria, in so doing, he forgets that none of these are tragedies which happened just because.
A massive missed opportunity presents itself in the scene, touted by the trailers, where Kirsten Dunst and Wagner Moura enter a clothes-store still operating in a suburb of which the inhabitants are doing their best to ignore the bloodshed outside. While Dunst and Moura are surprised, the scene is otherwise treated as a moment's respite from their grim circumstances, a welcome pretence of normality. Not once is the suggestion raised that precisely this kind of insularity may contribute to a country's sleepwalking into a downward spiral.
Which ties into what might be the film's most damning moment. Even an "apolitical" Hollywood movie cannot ignore the big question mark hanging over American history, the issue of race relations. Given that Sammy's character is black, how does Civil War broach this? In my last journal, I made a prediction that his fate would go as you'd expect in a Hollywood movie. On this, Alex Garland actually managed to surprise me, albeit not in a good way, for what also happens to be the closest the film ever comes to touching upon politics.
* Spoilers *
This takes of the form, as many will have guessed, of Jesse Plemons' extended cameo as a gun-totting white nationalist, e.g. the type of character Hollywood has reliably fallen back on when seeking to address racism in America, a figure which can comfortably slot into the role of an obvious psychotic bigot, thus absolving neo-liberal scriptwriters of having to examine any wider institutional factors at work.
Plemons' performance is chilling, make no mistake. Yet I should note that the trailers cheated a little with his "What kind of American are you" line. During the movie proper, he's demanding to know if Joel, who's recognisably Latino, comes from South or Central America.
Sammy does not die by Plemons' hand. As a matter of fact, he's the one who saves the day, by driving over the white nationalists and getting the others to safety. For a moment, I dared hope we'd dodged a bullet, so to speak -- then it turns out Sammy got hit by stray gunfire while making their getaway. Sure enough, he dies soon after.
Not great, yet nothing out of the ordinary, right? Except, get this, here's how the scene goes about adding to Plemons' body count; by introducing foreign correspondents, two journalists from Hong Kong, who show up out of nowhere to join our heroes mere minutes before they die.
Allow me to repeat; Alex Garland's script literally brings in a pair of Asian characters for the sole purpose of killing them off in the same scene. This is unforgiveably lazy writing, made worse by being the only hint we're given as to how the outside world regards the American Civil War.
*End Spoilers *
In any case, no movie made in 2024 should be trotting out the hoary old "black guy dies" cliché. Ultimately, the use of such betrays that for all of this movie's high-minded goals at nuance and avoiding preachiness, it remains stuck in a mentality that American cinema has struggled to outgrow for the last fifty years. By seeking not to spoon-feed the audience, which normally I'd treat as a plus, Alex Garland appears to have got obtuseness confused with subtlety.
Perhaps the argument that "both sides have their reasons, but ultimately it's just senseless cycles of violence" may once have sounded rational. At a time of extreme political polarisation, it may even still sound it, like a comforting escape hatch. In what is also a time of renewed generational violence in the Israel-Palestine conflict, though, where one side both makes its intentions clear to wipe out the other and has the means to do so, such equivocation does come across as irresponsibly craven.
Civil War wants to shock, and frequently succeeds, but it doesn't seem to know what it wants to shock you for, besides saying "Don't do this". When everybody is at fault, nobody is.
My recommendation? Watch Come And See. It shall haunt you long after fears rooted in 2024 may feel dated.
I saw the movie not long after it opened, and it left me with complicated thoughts — ones that I really didn't feel like sharing given the all-or-nothing reactions the movie was getting. (Either it's a triumphant piece of provocative cinema or it's the single worst political statement in history — no alternatives.) So thank you for setting a tone where I finally feel a little comfortable talking about the movie.
(As such, this is more my own review than a direct response to yours.)
Fwiw, it's definitely the most resonant work from Alex Garland since Ex Machina and Annihilation. I wanted to like Devs, but it just got too slow and bogged down over the course of its extended miniseries length and its themes never clicked, while Men was... a hot mess. But I love Ex Machina and Annihilation and I want to believe we can get something that good out of Garland again... and there a lot of points where Civil War almost makes it. Almost.
To start with some pros, when this movie is intense, wow is it intense. Scenes can really catch you off guard in the way things escalate, even when you know things are probably going to escalate. You can see a lot of the best elements of Garland’s style throughout the film, particularly visuals and editing. Fully agreed with you on the sound design, it is absolutely masterful. The movie takes advantage of its ground-level perspective in showcasing the grim spectacle, catching you in the moment and leaving you dreading the next bout of gunfire. And in all of that, it never dares give you a cheer moment.
I think the depiction of the war itself is better than I've seen it getting credit for from negative responses, albeit with holes. A key point brought up often surrounding the movie is how unprepared the US is for full-scale war on its own soil, and what we see during the “road trip” portion of the movie reflects that. Nominally this may be a war of states, but the reality is utter chaos throughout the whole path of travel, with a complete breakdown of trust, allegiances, currency, you name it. I know the sniper scene is among the more divisive sequences in the film, but i didn’t see it really as a lecture about being above morality or anything (as I’ve seen argued before) — it’s about succinct summation of the confusion of the situation.
The second half is the stronger half overall, led off by the Jesse Plemons scene, which is utterly fucking chilling. Plemons is the definition of a one-scene wonder, his questions oozing menace into the scene as you feel our leads trying desperately to figure out what he wants them to say. It’s probably the moment where the movie’s efforts at nonspecificity work to its advantage the best, because the fact that the audience is just as uncertain as to precisely what Plemons’ deal is amps up the tension as you wait to see how he reacts to anything said to him. It’s an iconic moment, despite the big flaw you mentioned and that i fully agree with (see further below).
Aside from that, the efforts at “apoliticality” are a mixed bag. Where I think it works best is as a way to show how far into the war we are — the causes being fought for have been lost within the fighting itself. This isn’t a movie where the journalists chronicle the firebrands championing the need to fight, it’s where the journalists are encountering the people on the ground who, whatever they thought of the buildup to the war, were probably convinced they could lead normal lives until one day they finally couldn’t. It’s perhaps most pronounced when we meet the Western Forces troops who are excited to hunt down Nick Offerman’s Trump-inspired president, but are excited less at the prospect of dispensing justice than of claiming the war’s biggest trophy. By and large, at least in the moment, that aspect was working for me, in showing just how much the war has drained the souls of its participants.
Where it doesn’t work is in a lot of the earlier sequences. Most bluntly, it fails in the references to factions and divisions within the US and its various splinter entities, which frankly come off as laughable. I can pass off the Texas-California alliance — strategic partnerships can happen for a lot of reasons — but references to things like “Portland Maoists” and “antifa massacre” are a disastrous mistake to include, as those are loaded terms treated as disposable namedrops, and they prove impossibly distracting any time they happen. And while i thought the ambiguity over allegiances worked decently well in the sniper scene and Plemons scene, it doesn’t work very well in the extended scene where our leads are covering a fight between two militias, or possibly a US military squad and a militia. There the lack of clarity took away from the moment, and any potential impact in seeing one side commit horrible acts against the other, because it negates any reason to find anything shocking about their brutal behavior in a brutal war.
Speaking of not finding anything shocking, let’s talk about the characters. The performances, like you said, are pretty darn good. But the characters come across less as numb and more just entirely out of place. Nowhere is that more evident than with Cailee Spaeny as the young wannabe photojournalist Jessie, who idolizes Kirsten Dunst’s experienced veteran photojournalist Lee. Jessie feels like a character who might exist at the start of this war, not its conclusion. The movie wants to use her as a classic instance of Break the Cutie, but it feels inauthentic. What was she even doing before this? All we know is she has a relative somewhere trying to ignore the war. Anyone this deep into the war should already have been affected, even if, like the one town they visit, they’re trying to hide it. Having a tagalong ingenue here does not work, and the film presenting her as having always wanted to be a war journalist feels silly. She might have worked better as someone who wanted to be a more general news photographer or nature photographer, but who now feels duty-bound to shift gears to the war. She can still be sheltered — just not this sheltered.
The other lead characters just feel a little too blasé, in a way that sometimes works for individual scenes but doesn’t quite cohere into a whole picture. And the closeness they’re allowed to get to the militias and other combat situations feels disingenuous, a misattributed mark of in-universe sanctity for a profession that is regularly targeted and attacked in real life. If it’s meant to be a “thank you for your service” to war photojournalists, I don’t think it works.
And to cap it off, yeah, I was rolling my eyes hard when the two Hong Kong journalists showed up out of absolutely nowhere to be obvious cannon fodder. With how they end up being used…………… yeah. Even beyond that, though, it’s an astonishingly abrupt and awkward introduction. I don’t recall them being in the earlier hotel scene, and even if they were, wouldn’t it have made more sense to establish them maybe as rival journalists, seeking the same thing as them on an alternate route, rather than old friends that were inexplicably tailing behind them the whole time unseen? It’s a frustratingly damning mark against the otherwise sterling Plemons sequence.
By and large, Civil War is better than it could have been. It’s technically masterful, it’s genuinely gripping, and I like the core idea behind it — not chronicling the breakdown of a nation into civil war, but the painful horror of what happens when said war goes on and on. But it pointlessly, needlessly weakens itself with its awkward, sometimes frustrating insistence on ambiguity that makes what few references to the wider scope of the conflict seem ridiculous, and its characters just feel like a drain on the proceedings more often than not. It’s not a disaster, but that makes the ways in which it falters all the more disappointing. It’d be easy to dismiss if it was worse. But instead it exists in this awkward space that has made it all the easier to twist to whatever narrative a given viewer (or non-viewer) wants it to fit. For worse and definitely not for better, that might keep it in the conversation for a long while.
Well put, mate.
I cannot comment much on the film directly, other than the fact that everything I've seen of it hasn't really endeared me to watch it, but let me just mention Alex Garland's statement here on the film's messaging, which is just laughable knowing that he likes Come and See but appears to have walked away from it with the message that "wow, war is bad", and nothing else. And unlike Civil War, Come and See actually did spell out why the war in the film is being fought.
https://web.archive.org/web/20240410201440/https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2024/04/civil-war-alex-garland-interview/677984/
Coward.
Hello, 5777748. Your first comment on a piece of mine, I feel honoured.
Honestly, nearly everything you said here perfectly complements my opinion on Civil War, delving into the nitty-gritty that I chose to leave out from a journal which was already running rather long, even if "short" by my standards. I may only marginally disagree about which half was the stronger.
The point you bring up which I'll zone in on, because I agree it was nagging at me throughout the movie, is how the American journalists don't feel like Americans covering the dissolution of their own country; Jessie, in particular, feels as though she's sprung up ex nihilo. While it may be just about plausible that the older characters have walled themselves off, Jessie seems too innocent; surely a member of the younger generation would have powerful emotions about growing up to see their country die.
On a certain level, I imagine this too was deliberate, in order to heighten the atmosphere of surreal horror at watching these Western photojournalists travel across an American warzone as if it were an overseas war. But in this case, the artifice works against the movie by taking the viewer out of the experience.
I was genuinely feeling my brain tense up during the first two-thirds of Civil War. And then the Jesse Plemons scene came, reaching both a high and low, and the tension evaporated. Especially as the Washington D.C. battle couldn't help turning into the most "Hollywoodian" action setpiece of the whole flick.
~Vox
P.S.
The Hong Kong journalists' role and presentation may well sum up all you said regarding the movie's problematic use of ambiguity. When we don't know because the characters don't know, this works. When it feels like the characters are withholding information from us, this is frustrating.
The script likely omitted introducing the Hong Kong guys at the hotel out of concern this would take away from the suspense of "Who are these people and why are they following us?" when their car pulls up behind the protagonists.
Which again has the unfortunate effect of highlighting the contrivance.
In other words, 5777773,
Alex Garland chooses to make a statement by not making a statement, and he even admits as much.