In Civil War, writer/director Alex Garland issues a challenge to the audience: Are you willing to do what it takes to stop this possible future? You think a United States full of bombed-out buildings and mass graves couldn’t happen? Extremists pining for conflict: do you really want to watch the world burn? It might be awfully pretty, but it also might be the last thing you see.
Garland doesn’t pose these questions overtly, but such thoughts swirled during and after watching his spectacular, harrowing masterwork, which is as much horror movie as speculative fiction. Civil War also reminded me of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (and to a lesser extent War of the Worlds) in that it sidesteps the bigger story in favor of the dirty, ground-level experiences of its few characters, who observe the implosion of U.S. democracy one firefight, execution, and refugee camp at a time.
The central protagonist is Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), a veteran shutterbug loosely based on famous wartime photojournalists such as Lee Miller (among others found here). She’s joined by hotshot writer Joel (Wagner Moura), sweet but sluggish old-timer Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), and ambitious young photographer Jessie (squirrely Cailee Spaeny), an ingenue who admires Lee and wants to follow in her footsteps.
The foursome drive a “PRESS”-emblazoned SUV from New York City to Washington D.C., but traversing this 220-mile distance requires an 800-mile circuitous path due to blocked freeways and a military shoot-on-sight policy. It’s no coincidence that the movie’s series of vignettes occur in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Virginia, settings for key battles of America’s 1861-1865 Civil War, though this potent comparison is left unstated.
Civil War resembles a picaresque, filling its large, Hieronymus Bosch-like canvas with gruesome, tiny details. The film’s roadside tour of carnage parallels Apocalypse Now, especially given the end goal: interviewing an out-of-control Kurtz figure, in this case a fictionalized President of the United States. Oddly enough, it also vaguely resembles Stand By Me, with its travelogue of rural dangers and revelations leading up to a morbid grail.
While Civil War is careful to dissociate its conflict from current United States politics, it’s easy to find recent analogues. This briefly seen POTUS speaks with Trump-like hyperbole but could equally well pass as a doughy, gray-haired hybrid of Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. He’s played by comedian Nick Offerman, his levity erased in the manner of a once-charming dictator turned wartime-grim.
The president’s illegal third term (shades of Vladimir Putin redrafting Russia’s constitution to secure perpetual power) has sparked opposition from a Western Faction led by California and Texas, both states with recent, real-life secessionist movements. We briefly hear about a Florida Alliance, off on their lonesome like a bratty alligator. As unlikely as it all might seem, you could flip through history books and find any number of such developments in other countries.
Setting out to document the Western Faction’s attack on the White House, our four travelers stop at a small town’s corner gas station, the first of several wasteland-Americana stops (much of the film was shot in Georgia’s economically depressed regions). Negotiating a fuel price with proprietors holding assault rifles, a basic question arises that transcends national politics: “Friend or foe?” This time it’s friend if you can pay with Canadian money (the volatile U.S. dollar having lost all value), then foe if you notice the looters tortured and hanged in the nearby carwash.
The “Friend of foe?” question comes up repeatedly, often highlighting the two female photographers’ levels of experience. This time, the young Jessie almost panics and gets the group killed, but Lee (who has chronicled conflicts in Africa, Central America and elsewhere) has the presence of mind to tap the gunmen’s vanity by posing them proudly next to their victims.
Garland finds layers of irony (delicious, then unsettling) in the way the women’s roles shift during their journey. Lee, a reluctant mother/mentor who advises Jessie and saves her from suicidally dangerous behavior, sees herself in the young acolyte but is wary of their differences. As with Garland’s Annihilation (2018), the way people change each other isn’t always positive, with a hint of a subsuming All About Eve dynamic. Eventually Lee is the one reluctant to take photos, while Jessie warms to her task perhaps too much.
Civil War is smart in the way it uses photojournalism as an entry point to not only what war in the U.S. would look like, but the elemental psychology of danger. As he did for Annihilation‘s botanic mutations, cinematographer Rob Hardy matches the film’s ambivalence by finding saturated beauty in the midst of drab death. Soldiers execute captive enemies near a pastel-chalked wall. As a forest burns, a character views embers with childlike fascination. Colorful graffiti bouquets the concrete oppressivenes of an Eastern Bloc-like refugee camp. In a brief scene, a sarcastic sniper turns out to have various metallic shades of painted fingernails, as if the war ruined his plans to attend a rave. (His irritation suggests somebody who really regrets past voter apathy.)
War can switch suddenly from boredom to heart-racing fear, and watching Civil War is like repeatedly having your head dunked from hot to cold water. A scene following soldiers clearing a building room-by-room evokes the excitement of the finale in Children of Men, while another scene of a town whose oblivious residents have chosen to live in denial draws comparison to The Zone of Interest. Civil War is at times exciting, scary, meditative, and ridiculous. The film often swings dramatically in tone, such as a sequence reminiscent of Footloose‘s foolish car-hopping.
Things become especially distressing when Jesse Plemons shows up as an impatient, trigger-happy soldier. At first I thought, “Oh, it’s another Dunst/Plemons twofer,” because the married couple have already teamed up in The Power of the Dog and a season of the TV show Fargo. But I snapped out of it as it quickly became apparent that Plemons was in full scary mode. He literally wears rose-colored glasses, not out of optimism but, apparently, to mask the sight of blood.
Among many subjects Civil War addresses is Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, both on an individual level and as something people suffer collectively. The photojournalist Lee Miller, upon whom Dunst’s character is based, became clinically depressed as a result of all the horrors she’d witnessed. Dunst, far from her cutie-patootie days, depicts weariness with substantial gravitas. When she touts the mission of photojournalism — “We record so other people ask” — it made me think of Nick Ut’s 1972 photo The Terror of War, which made it impossible for viewers to deny the horrible reality of napalm strikes in Vietnam.
I interpreted Dunst’s character as worrying about the future potency of her profession, especially when the plucky Jessie falls into the adrenaline-junkie pattern of journalist Joel. Propelled by Brazilian actor Wagner Moura’s charismatic energy (he was a standout in 2013’s Elysium), the self-medicating Joel resembles stormchasers in Twister, blurting “What a rush!” out of desensitized habit. The elder Sammy (played with kindly assurance by Stephen McKinley Henderson) balances Joel like base and acid.
Like the minimalist music score (by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury), the point-A-to-point-B episodes feel matter-of-fact, but they’re loaded with thematic through-lines. Civil War sees the breakdown of order not just in violence, but in how we turn violence into spectacle, filtering serious observations in ways that reduce them to entertainment. Sometimes it’s a coping mechanism: When Jessie says “I’ve never been scared like that before, and I’ve never felt more alive,” Cailee Spaeny’s monotone delivery suggests a numbed survivor grasping for a silver lining. But when those on media’s frontlines lose perspective, everybody loses. Embedded reporters become misdirected, and competitive mavericks turn into Paparazzi unable to see how their presence makes things worse.
Repeatedly, the movie shows us people posing next to those they’ve killed, like big-game safari hunters kneeling alongisde slaughtered lions. The images become documents of crystallized conquest, but the emptiness of the death-grinning faces seems inhuman, almost alien. It reminds me of the photos U.S. soldiers took in the Abu Ghraib prison early in the 2003-2011 Iraq war, smiling next to beaten, tortured, and dead captives. The people smiling probably felt they had done their patriotic duty, but to others those smiles looked evil.
It’s interesting, too, how Civil War marks a full-circle path of photojounalism at a crossroads. The 1861-1865 Civil War was arguably the first war well-documented in photos, but because daguerrotypes required long exposures, many Civil War photos were posed, often deceptively. In 2024, we’re at a new phase of distrust, where thanks to deepfakes and artificial intelligence, we soon might not be able to believe photos at all. A valid concern over the degradation of the medium seems to be at the root of Kirsten Dunst’s character, as well as director Alex Garland, who recently implied this movie might be his last.
Exiting the theater, I saw a lone man stumble out, as if in a daze, looking like a stereotypical militia member with camouflage gear and unkempt beard. I wondered if he’d been inspired by the brazenly outrageous visions of the Lincoln Memorial blown up, or the White House overtaken: Was it a thrilling fantasy to him, or a sacrilege? Civil War doesn’t pretend to know what might replace our government or media when they fall apart, but it bolstered my conviction that we shouldn’t be in a hurry to get there.
