Civil War

Alex Garland’s ‘near fiction’ action epic Civil War ventures deep into the heart of American darkness.

It tells the story of a group of semi-embedded journalists from New York to Washington D.C. to capture one last interview with the President of the United States before he himself may be captured by the Western Forces of Texas and California whose revolution is gaining momentum.

That’s basically all you need to know about the plot. And besides, Garland doesn’t tell us much more. 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 feeds on 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 hero. 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 shot and killed,’ Jessie asks Lee at some point, ‘would you still take the shot?’ To which Lee grimly replies: ‘what do you think?’ 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, in which the group travels the country is a bit more episodic (but then, so is war).

That middle section does introduce a vile, racist and psychotic character, played by 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… there’s folks being shot at close range, there are prisoners of war taken out behind the shed and executed, and I could go on.

Civil War is, of course, an anti-war movie. The action scenes are thrilling, to a certain extent, but Garland never lets you forget that war is a truly horrific experience. And maybe, the writer-director of other masterpieces like Ex-Machina and Annihilation seems to say, Civil War is closer than we think.

I give it four stars now, 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.