FILM FORUM: Civil War, III

In Civil War, camera-wielding Truth-Tellers face trials by fire

Perhaps it’s predictable that a movie called Civil War would divide audiences. 

But many reviews of Alex Garland’s fourth feature film—including those from some of my favorite critics—perplex me. They’re complaining that this vision of a future America at war with itself is just sound and fury. It seems they bought tickets for pointed political commentary on current culture wars and got a movie that “loses itself in a nonpartisan fog, a thought experiment that short-circuits thought” (The New Yorker). They call it “a cop out” (Vanity Fair), one “drained of ideological meaning” (The Guardian). They want to know “how the America of 2024 might have become the future America in the film” (Time Out). 

I don’t remember Cormac McCarthy’s novel The Road or Alfonso Cuarón’s sci-fi film Children of Men being held to such a standard. Both futuristic nightmares play out in similarly dystopian contexts, and they’re celebrated as contemporary classics. Are we so anxious about our endangered democracy that we’re growing impatient with speculative fiction?

And Civil War is more explicit than either of those in its correlations with our contemporary crises. The first Civil War character we meet is an avatar of Trump-ish authoritarianism: a “third term” U.S. president (played by Nick Offerman). Rehearsing propaganda, he claims that “some are calling” his federal forces’ assault on secessionist states “the greatest victory in the history of mankind.” We know this strategy: Make hyperbolic claims, cite no sources, offer no evidence. Just tell your base what they want to hear. 

Perhaps this prologue inclines viewers to expect that what follows will be a resounding indictment of a particular party. It’s there if we look for it: This strongman’s vows to “fulfill the promise of our forefathers to the flag, to the nation, and to God” turn out to be just noise to cover up his flagrant assault on democracy. He has ordered air strikes on Americans who oppose him. He has eliminated the FBI. And he’s made D.C. a place where journalists are shot on sight.

But Garland, prioritizing more than partisan politics, scrambles the rest of this alternate reality to the point of absurdity. Gaining the upper hand against this rogue “president,” the secessionist rebellion comprises California, Texas, and Florida. Surely this is meant to get a laugh! What’s more, rebels identify as the Western Forces—the “WF.” Whether we’re supposed to think of a pro-wrestling acronym or the abbreviation “WTF,” who can say? This worst-case-scenario is as much a fantasy as the last blockbuster with “Civil War” in the title—the one that pits Captain America against Iron Man.

It’s easy to miss, in the roar of military helicopters and automatic weapons, what matters most: the central thread of this narrative tapestry. We won’t see that would-be dictator again until the end. The real story, it turns out, is a hero’s journey already in progress.

An accomplished but disillusioned war photographer, Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) is on assignment with her professional partner Joe (Wagner Moura), a Reuters reporter, to document the war’s inevitable turning point. Their quest is simple—and maybe suicidal. They’ll venture across battle lines from New York to the White House. “D.C. is falling,” Joe tells a colleague. “And the President is dead inside of a month. Interviewing him is the only story left.” 

Much to Lee’s dismay, Joe risks their success by making back-seat passengers of the accomplished but elderly Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and, worse, a rookie photographer named Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) who idolizes Lee. From there, Civil War might be compared to Jurassic Park, with its “found family” assailed by monsters while accelerating through a wilderness. But this is not a Spielbergian adventure spiked with whimsy; it’s an R-rated tour of atrocities. Heading upriver into the heart of darkness, Lee fears her unwanted apprentice is unfit for the horrors that await them. After an up-close encounter with violence, Jessie blames herself for not intervening, but Lee shuts her down: “Once you start asking yourself those questions, you can’t stop. So we don’t ask. We record so other people ask. You want to be a journalist? That’s the job.” 

Manohla Dargis (The New York Times) describes the movie’s “old-fashioned faith in journalism.” But I sense in Garland’s film a willingness to question the limits of such reportage. Does an Abu Ghraib-like image of American soldiers grinning boastfully over slain enemies activate America’s conscience anymore? Or is it just another dopamine hit? Lee confesses to Sammy: “Every time I survived a war zone and got the photo, I thought I was sending a warning home: Don’t do this. But here we are.” She’s losing faith in the moral compass that has guided her camera. (And Sammy’s own commitment to professional detachment will soon falter.) Meanwhile, it’s unnerving to see Lee’s student seeking out violent spectacle like a baby vulture learning to scavenge. 

Garland has never pandered to audiences with simplistic binary thinking. Showing us possible futures fractured by human hubris in contexts of technology (Ex Machina, Devs), biology (Annihilation), and gender dynamics (Men), he’s refused us any easy answers. Thus, his x-rays of cultural cancers have kindled lasting conversations. I suspect moviegoers will be haunted by Civil War’s vision of American arrogance eroding law, order, and Constitutional ideals. A journalist groans, “There is no coordination between the secessionists. As soon as they get to D.C., they’ll turn on each other in minutes.” “No one’s giving us orders, man,” a soldier shrugs. “Someone’s trying to kill us. We are trying to kill them.”

I’m haunted by many images captured by cinematographer Rob Hardy. Fading graffiti on a Pennsylvania bridge: “Go Steelers!” The parking lot of a desolate shopping mall, where we glimpse what may be an abandoned cineplex. Winding country roads that are now occasions for jump scares instead of John Denver songs. The film’s most frightening image is a mass grave guarded by a gun-wielding militia man (Jesse Plemons) who shows no mercy to those who fail to meet his measure of a “real American.” 

But Civil War offers more than horror. As Lee and Jessie, Dunst and Spaeny give the movie a meaningful story of mentorship in which both characters have something to learn. Dunst gives a raw, rugged performance. For two hours, you’ll forget she was ever the glamorous star of Spider-Man, Marie Antoinette, and perfume commercials. Like Jessie imitating Lee, Spaeny has followed in Dunst’s footsteps by playing the lead in a Sofia Coppola film (Priscilla). Here, she’s playing a perfect counterpoint to her famous co-star.

And when Lee and Jessie arrive at the climactic firefight, their contrasting choices confront us with a profoundly paradoxical conclusion. As thrill-seeking moviegoers lean forward to see if the WF succeeds in killing the “president,” others might focus on more important matters: What have the mentor and student learned along this road? What will they do in the moment of truth? What should we hope they do?

Few of us are war photographers. But we all carry devices that enable us to post testimonies, share credible sources, donate to causes, and even capture eyewitness evidence for the historical record. Civil War dares to ask us if the tools we use for truth-telling might sometimes be mechanisms for avoiding what love ultimately requires. 

Looking back, though, I’m haunted most by one of the pre-movie commercials: a recruitment campaign for the U.S. Air Force that boasts “The entire sky belongs to us!” Sounds suspiciously similar to claims made by the vainglorious fascist who haunts Garland’s nightmare.

Jeffrey Overstreet teaches creative writing and film at Seattle Pacific University and writes at LookingCloser.org and at Substack. His writing on film has been published in Image, Christianity Today, Paste, and Bright Wall Dark Room. A follow-up to his moviegoing memoir Through a Screen Darkly (Baker Books) is due in 2025 from Broadleaf Books.