A24. 2024. Thriller. 109 min.
Grade: 3.5 out of 4
Anyone licking their chops at the prospect of President Joe Biden standing in front of a firing squad in IMAX or former President Donald Trump being hung—Mike Pence style—in 70mm will be sorely disappointed by writer/director Alex Garland’s new film, Civil War. But if the possibility of such a sight is your only reason for buying a ticket to this often-disturbing, often-thrilling, often-formulaic provocation, then you are the problem that led to the fictional events Garland so bracingly dramatizes. This story of a near future America where California and Texas have seceded from the Union and formed the Western Front with designs on overthrowing what remains of the American government sees Garland (Ex Machina, Men) being exceedingly coy about the events prior to the start of the film. Whether the offhanded mention of an “Antifa massacre” means Antifa members were massacred or they massacred others is never explained but it’s a mic drop that one will pick up with either their left hand or their right. Whether the U.S. president (Nick Offerman), currently in his Constitutionally prohibited third term, is meant to be you-know-who is never addressed (although the president’s bloviation that “Some are already calling it the greatest victory in the history of mankind” might point us in one particular direction). Garland’s backstory-bereft approach is not creative cowardice but rather an acknowledgement that our media-fueled disdain for “the other side” can fill in the blanks with more internally combustible rage than he can. What Garland does is trade on that anger and slowly shame us for it, testing to see if we’re so far gone that we can’t be horrified that some version of the events depicted could actually happen.
Despite the immersive thrills that mark the best moments of Civil War—and there are plenty of nominees for the best moment of this gripping, slow burn drama that crescendos into a bravura and disturbing finale—it’s nevertheless initially disappointing that Garland’s thought experiment is wrapped in the most unoriginal of genre conceits: the road trip. Odder still, although ultimately rather clever given Garland’s dispassionate, documentary-adjacent approach, are his main characters; three generations of journalists whose detached, goal-oriented nature is constantly tested as they drive, Heart of Darkness-style, from New York to Washington D.C. to interview the president.
Each encounter—the stop for gasoline, the detour to a less than festive “Winter Wonderland”—introduces us to soldiers (some conscripted, some not) whose allegiance we’re often not sure of which keeps us off balance. Leading the group is Lee (Kirsten Dunst), a hardened to the point of numbness war photographer who laments that “Every time I survived a war zone and sent the photo home, I thought I was sending a warning. But here we are.” She’s accompanied by journalist Joel (Wagner Moura from Narcos), as well as Lee’s mentor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) who writes for “what’s left of The New York Times.” If anything, one could read Civil War as the end result of the failure of journalism to decide when to care and when to merely document, as well as its ratings and power hungry role in the fracturing of America’s soul. Whatever the future of journalism may be is embodied in a cub photographer that Lee and Joel meet during the opening scene of desperate New Yorkers rioting around a tanker containing water rations. She is Jessie (Cailee Spaeny from Priscilla), a self-described Lee fangirl who the veteran reluctantly takes under her wing during their perilous drive to D.C.
Working in an entirely new gear, director Garland—whose script for 28 Days Later proves he knows how to dramatize societal collapse—takes an approach that is urgent, uncomplicated and with clear-eyed purpose. Shot by his longtime DP Rob Hardy, the images disturb because they mostly lack the Hollywood gloss that would maintain a safe distance between the audience and the goings-on. Indeed, we are not meant to be comforted by the idea that Civil War is just a movie. We are meant to be troubled that someday Civil War could become a retroactive documentary. We’re as much a character in the film as Lee and the rest, all of us traveling through a hollowed-out America that we all helped create by our actions or inactions. The only difference is that the central foursome bury their emotions in their journalistic quest to tell the story whereas our still-fresh recollections of what made this grim and often uncomfortable to watch movie so plausible are constantly dancing in our heads. And each crumb of dialogue that Garland drops regarding the state of his version of an imploding America only engages us (and depresses us) even further.
As the sorrowful Lee, Dunst has never been better. Her stone face looks so grimly immoveable that when she briefly and reluctantly tries on a dress during a stop at a bucolic town willfully ignoring the America crumbling around them, her smile feels like a dam of internalized tears showing its first tiny crack. Count to three and it hardens again. As the grizzled veteran Sammy, Henderson is terrific as the plain talking voice of reason while Jesse Plemons is featured in a single scene, a nail-biter of a showdown where his rifle-toting militant asks Joel, “What kind of American are you?” That Joel is actually South American could be the wrong answer to those conditioned to automatically think ill of immigrants.
Garland’s worst case scenario version of American democracy comes during the film’s final stretch, a visceral and heart pounding sequence where Western Front soldiers—with Lee and her cohorts documenting the violence—storm D.C. to find the president. From here it seems obvious that a happy ending is not in the cards. Nor should it be. Garland is committed to using his fictional characters to confront the America we’ve created, one poisoned by fear, terrified of demographic change that’s just a fancy term for racism, and weaponized by the media. His film, while overtly political, is not overtly partisan. And to sit in your theater seat shocked at the film’s ending while adding up the ways in which “your side” presumably prevailed is to take one more step towards making Garland’s film a reality.