Civil War (Alex Garland, 2024)
Alex Garland’s Civil War is a ‘near future’ action epic that ventures deep into the heart of American darkness.
It tells the story of a group of semi-embedded journalists who travel from New York to Washington D.C. to capture one last interview with the President of the United States before he is captured by the Western Forces of Texas and California, whose road to secession is gaining momentum.
That’s basically all you need to know about the plot. And besides, Garland doesn’t tell us much more, instead letting us figure out for ourselves where we are in the story.
Suffice to say, Civil War takes place in a future America where words like ‘Democrats’ or ‘Republicans’ seem to have lost all meaning. Or as one soldier puts it halfway through the movie: ‘There are some guys out there trying to kill us. And we are trying to kill them.’
Even though the movie is full of violent war scenes, Garland mainly focuses on our little group of four protagonists: Kirsten Dunst plays Lee Smith, a very experienced war photographer, who has seen it all and is nearing the end of her tether. She works for the international press agency Reuters, as does Joel (Wagner Moura), who still feeds off the adrenaline of being in a war zone. Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) is a veteran reporter who works for The New York Times, or, as Joel sardonically puts it ‘what’s left of it’.
Rookie Jessie (Cailee Spaeny, from Priscilla) carefully insinuates her way into this band of brothers. She idolizes Lee, but she also wants to emulate her heroine. Lee sees a lot of herself in Jessie, and that’s exactly why she doesn’t want Jessie to tag along on their dangerous mission.
To no avail, of course. ‘If I get killed,’ Jessie asks Lee at some point, ‘would you still take my picture?’ To which Lee grimly replies: ‘What do you think?’ Of course she would! These people are the job. They don’t take sides, they don’t interfere, they just report on what’s going on.
Looking at the movie as a whole, I thought the first half hour and the last twenty minutes were very impressive. They really draw the viewer in. The middle section, the road movie part in which the group travels the country is a bit more episodic (but then, so is war).
Some of these episodes work a little better than others, but that middle section does introduce a vile, racist and psychotic character, played by the inimitable Jesse Plemons (Killers of the Flower Moon), who just wants to kill as many people as possible.
Speaking of killing, the movie has a lot of kill shots, so if you’re sensitive to that, consider this a trigger warning. There’s folks being shot at close range, a wounded man is finished off, and there are prisoners of war taken into a field and executed. I could go on.
Civil War is, of course, an anti-war movie. The action scenes, shot like most of the movie in a cinema verite style, with hand held, self stabilizing cameras, are thrilling enough, especially when the Western Forces come upon Washington, but Garland never lets you forget that war is a truly horrific experience.
And if you ask what the writer-director of masterful works like Ex-Machina (2014) and Annihilation (2018) is trying to say? Well, I suppose that even in our own current polarized times Civil War is already closer than we think.
I give it four stars, but who knows, maybe in ten years time, if the movie turns out to be really prophetic, I’ll give it five.
That’s a joke of course. Or maybe not.
Note: Civil War recently premiered at the South by South West Festival in Austin, Texas and will have a global launch next month, with the United States, United Kingdom and The Netherlands slated for the week of April 11.