Civil War (2024)

Rated R for a lot of brutal violence and gore.  While language plays a not insignificant role, this is a movie about the brutality of war and how people can become desensitized to such insane atrocities.  Main characters die in sad and tragic ways.  It is an incredibly bleak movie that almost tries to break its audience.  There's an especially upsetting scene that involves a mass grave.  R.

DIRECTOR: Alex Garland

When I saw this trailer a few years ago, I thought I was going to be there on opening night.  I really did.  I wouldn't shut up about the trailer.  I showed it to film classes, guys.  I showed it to film classes.  Then my film students went to go see this movie.  But do you know what else was true?  I rarely get to go to the movies.  And I'm going to call out the elephant in the room.  This week, with the vocal shouts for civil war against the left, I realized that it was time to watch his movie.  I wish I watched it as an Alex Garland film.  I wish I watched it as simply well-crafted storytelling.  Instead, I watched it because I had to react to people wanting to throw this country into disarray.

And I did that thing that I always do.  I get too invested in wanting the movie to be great, meaning that I had insane expectations.  I do think that Alex Garland is a genius.  I do. The man is very very smart and his movies often challenge me more than his contemporaries' films do.  But I'm going to be honest with you:  Civil War is good, not great.  I'm sorry to one of my students who embraced this film as one of the best movies that he's ever seen.  It's very good.  I love that he loves it.  It's just...not what I needed the movie to be.  

Civil War is a tightrope walk.  There are two things to balance: the setting and the story.  Sometimes, a story works in any environment.  With the case of Civil War, the story should be enough.  It really should be.  Because I'm dancing around this, I'm just going to spell it out.  The core of Civil War is Garland's commentary on the dehumanization of journalists.  Much like The Hurt Locker, these are people who are so traumatized by war that they tend to have inhuman responses to things that should be destroying them.  When these characters are reminded of their own humanity in their darkest of moments, those moments are so painful that they have no sense of self because healthy coping mechanisms are so taxed that it all becomes somehow unreal.   If I was looking at the film through that lens, I would have thought the film mostly effective.  If anything, I'm quasi-applaud Garland for being as straightfoward as he is about the characterization of these journalists and the moral grey area that they exist in.  Sure, I wish there was an extra element that can only be found in a Garland film.  But instead, that Hurt Locker element works.  I kind of see, without the set dressing of a second American Civil War as the background, Civil War working more as a Katheryn Bigelow film.

But the movie is set in contemporary America during a violent civil war.  And that's where my gripes about the movie lie.  This is a movie that needed to get made.  Again, I lost my mind over that trailer, showing the brutal reality of American fighting against American.  It was political commentary and I was here for it.  But the trailer was more effective when it came to selling the political reality than the film itself was.  Garland kind of digs himself into a hole for this one.  He's a guy who takes a weird conceit and then humanizes it.  It's what makes him an amazing storyteller.  But the story of Lee and Jessie is so character driven that there is almost no opportunity to create a world of moral justice.  Garland doesn't adapt our Trump / post-Trump environment.  There are elements of Trump in there, most notably in Nick Offerman's attempt to spin reality to make himself look good.  There are archetypes and stereotypes of the far-Right.  Jesse Plemons's racist serial killer probably aligns with a culture allegorically.  But the movie, in no uncertain terms, creates a grey area where everyone kind of sucks.  Real war is probably a world where everyone sucks.  But Civil War treats the Western Forces, or WF, as bloodthirsty killers who can't wait to put a bullet in someone's head.  Garland crafts a world where we are not sure if we want to see the White House fall or not.  

The reason that we can't really tell that is because the journalists in this story are so divorced from their subject that we get no commentary.  For all I know, this is a story about how reporters need to abandon objectivity, but I don't quite get that.  What that comes down to is that these two ingredients don't quite mix well.  This should either be a story about the downfall of civilization with open commentary about potential answers to this problem or be about journalists finding their souls in the midst of all of this inhuman misery.  I don't think it works as both.  Honestly, if I stick Lee or Jessie in the middle of another country, even if it is fictional, I think the story works better.  Because Lee and Jessie aren't mortified that these are Americans who are perpetuating these war crimes.  They aren't moved by anything.  Instead, Lee is more having a Ghost of Christmas Past moment by seeing Jessie make the same mistakes that she did as a kid.  The United States stuff has little to do with that journey. Ultimately, this is a battle for Lee to find her soul.  And from that perspective, that works.  Again, stick them somewhere where America doesn't play a part in that, and it works better.

There are consequences to that mismatching of ingredients.  I do think, that with its attempt to shock audience with American violence (which, again, I think needs to be in a movie just about that), that the Jessie and Lee relationship is sacrificed.  Lee, for the most part, is kind of passive about Jessie's spiral into brokenness.  It is supposed to be a shocking moment when Jessie captures Lee's death on camera because the movie is heavily implying that the inverse is going to happen.  After all, Jessie asks Lee if Lee would photograph Jessie's body after she dies.  (We know she wouldn't because she deletes the photo of Sammy's body when alone.) But Lee's internal conflict is that she regrets her callous life so much that she is fighting for the soul of this girl.  (Sure, Jessie is 23, but Lee thinks of her as a child.) Lee doesn't do much to change Jessie's mind.  If anything, Lee goes more introspective than anything else, which makes sense considering that her conflict is mostly internal.  It's just that we don't have a ton of beats where Jessie's soul is laid bare.  She vomits when she escapes the Neo-Nazis, but that's mainly because she was about to die.  Honestly, Lee is more moved in the scene where Sammy dies than Jessie is.  If anything, Sammy's death galvanizes her to become a hardened reporter.  So when Lee because of Jessie's selfishness, of course Jessie wouldn't be moved like that. I wish there at least was some flicker of the human in Jessie when she snaps those photos.  Instead, it simply read as a pupil replacing the teacher.  Lee's death was treated as matter-of-factly as anything else that Lee captured on camera.

But, again, I needed more of that interaction to make the story worthwhile.  Either that, or get rid of it entirely and make it about survival in Trump's Civil War.  But I don't see both of these elements working because neither gets the proper weight or commentary.  It's too short and the elements don't gel like they should.  If this wasn't Alex Garland, I would say that this movie would have been a powerhouse.  But it is Alex Garland and I tend to expect more from him.