Civil War

dir: Alex Garland

2024

I remember when I first heard that such a flick as this was coming out, I thought “too soon”. I thought it would be about the abject and persistent stupidity of the Trump years resulting in some ill-considered what if? scenario whereby even worse things happened than what happened, like, millions of deaths and such due to covid-related madness.

And then when I found out “it’s not about America’s gun obsession or the orange emperor – it’s about war correspondent journalists” I thought it would be an odd concoction, indeed.

I wasn’t really worried about the current status of legacy journalism. I mean, we all should be, since the blank eyed salamanders of Silicon Valley and venture capital have gutted newsrooms and papers the world over, to be replaced with whatever trenchant thoughts complete idiots think need to be loaded into the push notifications on our phones. But honestly the last time I thought about war correspondent photographers was… never.

They can look after themselves. There have always been sets of clichés about them, like they’re a cut above regular boring journalists because they put themselves in such proximity to danger for the good of the rest of us. The main cliché in American stuff that I recall is the one about how they all wear vests with pockets and such, and that they’re undependable adrenalin junkies who don’t feel alive unless bullets are flying past their ears.

I don’t feel any particular way about them, though I am in general a fan of journalists and journalism. Photographers on the other hand…

That whole mentality about doing anything for the perfect shot, and that it’s the perfect shot that can change the world’s collective mind about a topic, is a bit precious, for me. The Vietnam War was apparently going great until someone snapped two photos, one of someone executing a member of the Viet Cong (by Eddie Adams) and the little girl running down a path after her village was dowsed in napalm (by Nick Ut), missing her clothes and skin. After that, nah, things went bad.

It’s either a simplistic rendering of what changes hearts and minds about something (as terrible as a war), or it points to our collective fixation that the visual trumps the intellectual; that a picture, a frozen moment in time will do more to move people than a thousand accurate words about the same topic.

If there was a time when the visual moved people to action, I’m sorry, that time has past. Photos and even video footage now, thanks to years of people watching digital effects laden movies, and the looming spectre of AI-manipulated or generated images means people no longer believe the evidence of their own eyes.

Maybe this flick is saying that there is something still ‘true’ about documenting, about witnessing events, the necessity of it, but otherwise it depicts these people as broken lunatics.

I mean, they’re not healthy people. Beyond the clichés, I think the film deliberately doesn’t make what they do seem important in the scheme of important things happening. They are our protagonists, but they are not the main characters in the story being depicted. Sure, they go to insanely dangerous lengths to get their shots, but no photo changes anyone’s fate or changes anyone’s minds about anything.

Lee (Kirsten Dunst) is a jaded veteran photojournalist who barely reacts after a suicide bomber kills a bunch of people right next to her, but she does save a young citizen journalist, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), from having her head ripped off.

Lee and fellow cracked journo Joel (Wagner Moura) plan to travel a circuitous route in order to get to Washington DC just as an army descends upon the capital and tries to dislodge the incumbent president (Nick Offernan). The president doesn’t play much of a role in the film, being shown at the beginning trying to rev himself up to give a delusional speech about the state of the war, and then at the end when he meets his squalid ending.

What war? Why is there a war? Well, because…

The only clue we get is that this president is enjoying his third term, even though there’s a constitutional limit thanks to the 22nd Amendment of only serving two terms.

How could this president, who seems like a real piece of shit, have convinced people this was a good idea? Well, clearly, since Americans are openly slaughtering each other, he hasn’t convinced them of anything. Middle America, having the most guns but also the most pie, still sides with him, but the coasts, broadly speaking, have seceded, and are marching east or north to depose this dictator.

And there’s a sequence that indicates how economically fucked the economy has become through hyperinflation, with $300 US not being worth more than a sandwich, but $300 in Canadian dollars being enough for a half tank of petrol and to fill a couple of jerry cans.

A lot can be read into this little, but clearly it’s not the stuff that matters to director Alex Garland. He cares about how these four journalists react to all the bad shit that’s happening around them. So Lee, Jessie, Joel and a fourth journo who’s been trying to dissuade them the whole time called Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) pile into an SUV and start driving west, then south, then east, then north I think, trying to get to DC.

They will see things along the way. They will mostly see people indulge in the kind of depravity Americans generally only happen in them countries what are filled with foreigners. Sectarian violence, tribal violence, random violence where the factions aren’t clear, the reasons aren’t sensible, but the opportunity to slaughter people, well, who’d pass that up?

No-one’s blood is up, these aren’t enraged people doing these things, they’re just doing what they’re doing because…

There’s a sequence at a Christmas fair where they clearly think something hinky has happened. They can see a body wearing fatigues, that’s been shot, lying on the path. Joel is driving, and he’s the type (they all are, except for Sam) that drives towards danger instead of away from it, and so he proceeds, and then a sniper from a house starts trying to kill them all.

Why? Well, why not? They stop in cover, and find another sniper and spotter team trying to figure out where the jerk is. Joel asks them who they are and who the sniper is and why they’re trying to kill each other, and no-one knows anything, only that in order to survive they have to kill this other jerk.

The notion of sides, or teams, or armies means nothing.

There clearly are sides, but rarely do we know who is doing what and why, only that they’re fighting. The journos, though, my gods. Whenever they see someone with a uniform they stick so close to them it’s practically sexual harassment. It’s completely insane how close they try to get to people taking shots and actively being shot at. It’s queasy and uncomfortable to watch, and considering this is a flick in which there aren’t clearly delineated ‘good’ guys or ‘bad’ guys, it just makes me think all Americans as depicted in this flick are insane.

There’s maybe something to the idea that decades of gun violence and political partisanship has desensitised Americans sufficiently such that they’re not even that fazed when the nation falls apart. They just either go about their daily lives pretending it’s not happening, or start lynching people, or both.

The journos being jaded is meant to be more a condition of having been exposed to the unspeakable too many times before to care, but in other countries. Lee says at one point she thought the point of what she was doing overseas in warzones was to convince people Stateside not to repeat other people’s mistakes, but instead her “work” gives them and us the visual language to situate everything that’s happening and be okay with it.

Jessie is the one that hasn’t been worn down by years of exposure, and Lee seems to initially hate her for it. The easy and lazy take is that she sees her younger self in Jessie and would prefer, seeing how wrecked she is, how bone-weary and traumatised, maybe she can somehow save her younger self by being mean and unsupportive to Jessie?

But of course she takes Jessie reluctantly under her wing and encourages her to take idiotic risks and push herself forward in order to get a decent shot or two.

Being a road movie it mostly works as a sequence of vignettes of increasing complexity and danger. All of them say something terrible about people in general, or something mildly worrying at the very least. They don’t escalate in a horrifying progression, since most of them are just ugly or scary, up until one of the last ones that is genuine disturbing, and which is meant to be an almost literal baptism of fire / swimming through a mass grave for Jessie, completing her journey from naïve child to jaded hack.

It's all very well done, I guess. On a modest budget comparatively Garland manages to make a tough war inflected picaresque look very striking visually. Song choices are strong too, there’s a needle drop of Suicide’s Rocket USA that was very much appreciated.

The last sequence, as the Western Forces approach the White House, and our crazy journalists attach themselves like barnacles to some of these soldiers, is the standout section, and the one that most conventionally looks like an action flick.

Except where it is set, you’d think, what they’re representing, would have been taboo several years ago. Maybe 20 years ago, no-one would have had the gall or the gumption to stage an action sequence where soldiers are butchering Secret Service agents on their path towards dragging a president out from under his desk in order to execute him. Your (very) average action flick, starring Gerard Butler or Channing Tatum, would have had the action hero trying to protect the president from such a fate, and succeeding, whether they were played by Morgan Freeman or by Jaime Foxx.

But this is the era that we are in now. What changed?

Maybe that’s what Alex Garland is aiming for, or asking us to consider. Because the statement he’s trying to make here, which we keep being assured isn’t a political question (since people incorrectly keep saying that Civil War is deliberately apolitical, as if such a thing makes any sense) is how little does it take to allow people to let their savagery shine through?

This might be a question he’s been asking since 28 Days Later, because that too concerned itself with a world in which the temptation to do away with one’s own humanity was ever present, but at least that one had the excuse of rage zombies. This scenario doesn’t. It’s nothing external. It’s people deciding that whatever bound us together in some sort of agreement or compact in the (recent) past no longer applies, and it’s unlikely to ever be replaced.

In a lot of ways that’s even uglier than what the zombie movies and tv series contrive when they tell the stories of what awful lengths people will go to in order to protect the ones they love or slay the ones they loathe. Or perhaps the admonition is for us not to take what we have for granted, and to remember the ways in which we maintain the agreement between us. Maybe the truth of what we are meant to bear witness to is what keeps it all from falling apart.

Who knows. I won’t say that it was an enjoyable watching experience, because I was constantly on edge expecting terrible things to happen continuously. And it doesn’t help that the main characters do and say such terribly stupid things at certain times (admittedly which allow for the next plot points to occur, but still, that sequence with the people jumping through the windows of speeding cars for no fucking on screen reason was just absurd). While I liked the performance that Wagner Moura puts in as Joel, I found many of the things he said or did to be way too on the nose, like exclaiming that nearby gunfire was making him hard. That was pretty crass, and I don’t know that even the most jaded, cynical, soul-corroded war correspondent would be bellowing that knowing how many people are losing their lives.

Everyone puts in okay performances, but really, it hardly matters. They are just leaves in the whirlwind, and what happens happens completely independently of whether they’re there or not, but I guess they still bear witness.

Just like we did.

7 times I don’t actually think it completely works, but it’s still fairly interesting out of 10

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“Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning home - "Don't do this". But here we are.” - Civil War