The Pitch: In a nonspecific dystopian future, Alex Garland’s Civil War presumes a kind of societal breakdown that, on its face, seems silly: A tripartite secession from the United States on the part of the “Western Forces of Texas and California” and the “Florida Alliance,” among others. The President (Nick Offerman) offers hollow words of assurance that victory is coming soon; but looking at the empty cities and the armed skirmishes between varying tribes of uniformed soldiers within, it’s not looking good for the stars and stripes.
Caught in the middle, silently recording it all, is a small band of journalists — legendary war photographer Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), Reuters reporter Joel (Narcos’ Wagner Moura), wise New York Times veteran Sammy (Steven McKinley Henderson), and fresh-faced amateur photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). Together, they rush from New York City to Washington, D.C., for a last-ditch shot at interviewing the President as enemy forces advance toward the capital.
What Kind of American Are You? Love him or hate him, Alex Garland steadfastly refuses to give audiences what they might be expecting. When it works, it works; take his laudable takes on artificial intelligence (Ex Machina) or the ontological implications of AI (Devs). But sometimes Garland’s metaphors get away with him, like the reductive and muddy misogyny metaphors of Men. With Civil War, his latest, Garland may well have found his ideal thematic middle ground: contrary to what initial trailers might imply, his haunting dystopia is less focused on the why of America’s impending doom and more on the day-to-day how of what it would look like.
Indeed, you won’t get a shred of specificity into the logistics of the country’s trifurcated nature in Civil War’s sparse script. Little of the leadup to this violent revolution makes sense, and deliberately so; don’t expect the politics of the varying factions to line up to the expected blue-versus-red dynamics of a post-Trump, post-January-6th political landscape. What little we get of that comes from Sammy’s allusions to Offerman’s President being a dictator in his third term or a small but terrifying cameo from Jesse Plemons as a nationalistic militiaman who seems to be using the war to play out his own personal psychopath fantasies.
While some may decry that as political cowardice (why shy away from the real-life politics of what feels like our own impending civil war, after all?), it feels elementary to Garland’s pet interests. A British filmmaker, after all, Garland treats America the way many American films relate to distant wars in the Middle East — the factional dynamics are mere window dressing for the overall chaos of war, with war journalists bravely setting aside their personal safety to tell the story of what happened. “We report so they can ask,” Lee tells Jesse at one point; that may as well be Garland’s ethos as well.
A Private War: Indeed, Garland is far more interested in the ethics and personal bravery of wartime journalists, as filtered through our intriguing ensemble of leads. Dunst’s Lee is a battle-hardened, cynical photographer in the vein of her namesake, Lee Miller, or perhaps Marie Colvin (shades of the 2018 Rosamund Pike film A Private War abound); she’s seen it all and knows how to survive, and seems to compartmentalize the very haunting fact that the bloodshed she’s captured for years elsewhere is happening right in her own backyard.
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