Look, let’s be honest. From the opening seconds of its debut trailer, we all knew that Alex Garland’s “Civil War” would not be a pill that went down easily. Garland may have built his career around challenging visions of the future, but a film about a second American Civil War—in an election year, no less—is the kind of thing that gives even professional discourse writers a headache.
So, if it helps, I have both good news and bad news. The good news is that Garland’s latest film is as intricate as it is beautiful. The bad news? For better and a whole lot worse, we are going to talk about this movie for the rest of the year—and into the 2025 award season for good measure.
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In the near future, America as we know it has collapsed. California and Texas have seceded and formed the Western Forces, a military alliance meant to challenge the President’s chokehold on the East Coast. And since the beginning of the conflict, photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and journalist Joel (Wagner Moura of “Narcos” fame) have embedded themselves on the front line, capturing the stories of civilians and soldiers alike and spreading the updates from the war to every corner of the globe.
Being a journalist is a dangerous job in wartime America, and military forces aligned with the current administration have been known to execute reporters on sight. But even as the radio promises a historical victory for the United States, the news from the ground tells a different story: the Western Forces are winning, and the President is days away from being captured and executed for his crimes. With this in mind, Lee and Joel plan one last push into occupied territory in the hope of interviewing the President before Washington is torn apart.
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What follows is a dystopian road movie, where three generations of reporters—including Lee’s mentor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and young photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), who idolizes Lee—look to sneak into Washington D.C. before the invasion starts in earnest. The path they follow takes them on a winding road between states and blockades, and we are given a front-row seat to Garland’s bleak vision of America: one of endless death and destruction from people whose only drive is to kill those who would seek to kill them.
If you are someone who predicted “Civil War” to be a surprisingly apolitical film, give yourself a sticker. This is not to say that modern political conflicts do not exist in the movie; Lee’s career began in earnest when she photographed a deadly clash with Antifa, and Nick Offerman’s President is noted to have disbanded the FBI during his time in office. But Garland seems to have gone to great lengths – including the film’s enigmatic California-Texas coalition—to strip away modern politics and reveal the darker ideologies hidden underneath.
It’s hard to knock the timing. “Civil War” also premieres mere days after “20 Days in Mariupol” took home the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature. That film—which follows a film crew stationed in the Ukrainian city of Mariupol in the opening weeks of the Russo-Ukrainian War—offered audiences an unflinching perspective on modern wartime journalism. Director Mstyslav Chernov risked his life to stay behind and capture atrocities on film, only to watch his footage be dismissed as fabrications and the victims as crisis actors by Russian diplomats and ultranationalist talking heads.
The parallels between the two films are plentiful. “Civil War” is anchored in the perspective—if not the overt aesthetics—of documentary cinema. The camera follows Lee and Jessie as they commit extraordinary acts of violence to film, setting aside their own perspective on these cruelties to capture them as they happened. And for much of the film, these characters struggle with their role as an impartial observer—even as they find both excitement and validation in their battlefield excursions. For as inured as we’ve become to images of death and displacement in other first-world countries, “Civil War” enflames our discomfort by bringing the conflict to our own backyard.
Complicating this is Garland’s depiction of journalism, which—in both its impact and its ideals —refuses to fit neatly into any one box. “Every time I survived the war zone and sent the photo home, I thought I was sending a warning,” Lee confesses at one point. “And here we are.” Even if we accept that these characters are driven only by journalistic integrity and not adrenaline or fame, “Civil War” seems to ask how much any of this matters. Most people— even the parents of Lee and Jessie— just turn down the news and pretend nothing is wrong.
But if the film asks much of its audience in terms of narrative, it at least has the good grace to look damn good while doing so. Reunited with cinematographer Rob Hardy, Garland fuels his dystopia with urban decay, letting the countryside roll past the window in a series of bombed-out developments and parking garages as gunfire flashes into the evening skies. And when “Civil War” builds to its unforgettable finale —an all-out assault on the nation’s capital with Lee embedded at the front of the charge—Garland proves that this war was far more than just the background noise for what he had planned.
Those looking to “Civil War” for neat ideologies will leave disappointed; the film is destined to be broken down as proof both for and against Garland’s problematic worldview. But taken for what it is—a thought exercise on the inevitable future for any nation defined by authoritarianism —one can appreciate that not having any easy answers is the entire point. If we as a nation gaze too long into the abyss, Garland suggests, then eventually, the abyss will take the good and the bad alike. That makes “Civil War” the movie event of the year—and the post-movie group discussion of your lifetime. [A-]
“Civil War” opens up theatrically on April 12 via A24.