Civil War

★★★★

As the United States grows ever more divided, and the threat of civil war becomes more possible with each passing day, what responsibility does Alex Garland have as a filmmaker in representing what such a conflict might look like? Would it be dangerously insensitive to apply real-world politics to a story of escalating violence — like a dark premonition for the country’s future? Alternatively, does a detached science-fiction angle that strips the conflict of any of its timely nuances sort of trivialize the real threat America currently faces? In all honesty, I don’t think Garland is particularly interested in either option. “Civil War” manages to use a hypothetical second American Civil War as a jumping off point to explore the ethics and morals of war photography and journalism, and secondarily expects — no, requires — audiences to project their own political beliefs onto its blood-drenched battlefields. Call it a cop-out, but I found it greatly ambitious.

In either an alternate present or a very near future, the United States has fallen into a second civil war. Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) is a war photographer covering the conflict alongside her journalist colleague Joel (Wagner Moura). As the pair plan to travel from New York City to Washington, DC to interview the President before the secessionist forces descend on the nation’s capital, they find themselves saddled with two new travelling companions: Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a veteran journalist, and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), an eager wannabe photojournalist. As their journey routinely puts them in direct line of fire, Garland’s film grapples with the simmering tensions at the heart of modern America and the emotional dissonance required to capture it objectively.

Of course, there is no such thing as objectivity in front of a lens. Garland knows this. The moment a camera is pointed at a subject, it has perspective. It has subjectivity, because the person holding the camera has subjectivity. What “Civil War” does so effectively is interrogate its characters’ pursuit of objectivity, and the cold dehumanizing effect of viewing your comrades falling dead at your feet as a perfect photo op. Where is the line drawn? Disturbing apathy to the horrors befalling your country and friends is a sick price to pay for the money-shot. At what point does the aim of journalistic neutrality overshadow the basic tenets of being human?

And this is Garland’s angle. His subjectivity. The film may strive for an objective, simple aesthetic, and may possess an apolitical non-stance on its central conflict, but this is precisely his point. It’s a challenge to audiences to provide their own subjectivity to his “objective” presentation of war. And through this, he argues his own point about how compartmentalization and disassociation can rid gruesome and heartbreaking images of war of their gravity and emotional weight. He asks us not to be passive viewers but to engage with the images and reckon with the human cost behind them. A particularly poignant moment comes in the aftermath of a brutal firefight, as the hip-hop jam “Say No Go” by De La Soul rings through images of corpses and rubble and a violent execution. The vicious, needless slaughter of human lives, brother versus brother, emotionally undercut by the tonal shift to funky eighties beats. See it, push it down, and move on.

There is a stance being taken, a point being made. Leaving the origin of the country’s civil war to the imagination, as well as the confounding unlikeliness of some of the state’s alliances and the specific aims of the country’s splintered factions, calibrates the audience for a different experience than they may have been expecting. It isn’t about sides, who’s Democrat and who’s Republican, who’s right and who’s wrong. Stripping away that information, the film becomes centrally about the nature of conflict, the cost of violence and the road that escalating polarization leads to. At one point in the film, an unnamed combatant peering through a scope at an unseen target is asked which side he’s fighting for. He scoffs at the question: “No one’s giving us orders. Someone’s trying to kill us, we’re trying to kill them.”

The film’s violence is immediate and gripping. There’s a frenetic boots-on-the-ground intensity to the way much of it is captured, particularly when the film erupts in its bombastic finale. For those looking to simply scratch an itch, the dopamine rush of disaster movie destruction transposed onto some of America’s most recognizable landmarks, the film greatly satisfies here. Bullets wiz through Washington streets, rockets light up the night sky, explosions rattle the Lincoln Memorial. There is sick fun to be had in this sequence. But it is also, expectedly, deeply distressing, haunting stuff. Sandbag barricades on city corners, tanks firing into buildings, the White House windows gated and sealed. Doesn’t feel too distant from reality. And much of what makes it feel so tangibly present is its excellent sound design. See this as loud as possible. Gunfire rattles with deafening potency, jet engines scream overhead, explosions will throw you back into your seat. From a purely technical standpoint, the film is a masterclass.

Notably, its ensemble is excellent as well. Kirsten Dunst is brilliantly understated in one of her most effortlessly commanding performances, and Cailee Spaeny is wonderfully layered with the film’s most complex role, but it is the single-scene Jesse Plemons who makes the strongest impact as a chilling ultranationalist militiaman. He is truly one of the most adaptive, transformative performers of his generation, and he supports one of the most memorably tense scenes of the year thus far.

There are sights and sounds in Garland’s “Civil War” that have truly stuck with me. Though specific details of this imagined war may be ridiculous and unlikely, this scenario feels all too near. As the lights came on and the theatre cleared out, I sat in frozen shell-shock, observing the harrowing photograph slowly developing behind the scrolling credits. Alex Garland’s film is entertaining spectacle, but it is also deeply unsettling and anxiety-inducing. It plays with the familiar images of our collective nightmares to tell a grounded story of journalistic morality and the dehumanizing effect of objectifying war, and it does so with a horrifying immediacy. Before you know it, this could be more than fiction.