Before diving into the spoiler filled discussion, I do recommend watching the 2024 film Civil War, written and directed by Alex Garland. It’s worth watching, and I encourage people to form their own opinions on this film, which takes place in the near future during a second civil war in the United States. This discussion will be here for whenever readers are ready.
The opening scene of Civil War came to define my overall experience with the film. The U.S. President (Nick Offerman) rehearses a speech where he declares an imminent victory over secessionist factions. He clears his throat and tries out different words and choices for emphasis. The rehearsal is intercut with scenes of conflict in the second civil war, which cast doubt for viewers in the film’s audience on the President’s words. I thought this was such a riveting illustration of a peek behind the curtain. It was a deconstruction of the idea of official stories, the narratives presented by people with material power, and it tasks the audience with looking past such narratives to find the truth. The scene transitions to the speech airing on TV, and one of the film’s main characters, the journalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst), takes a photo of the TV screen with the President on it. I read this moment as illustrating the need for journalists to hold people in power accountable. Outside Lee’s window, an explosion erupts, both emphasizing the lies of the President’s speech about the coming end to the conflict and revealing the ever-present danger Lee has to confront as a war journalist. I was gripped.
However, there was a detail in this opening scene that confused me. The President’s speech mentioned something about separatists from Florida failing to bring the Carolinas to their cause. I had questions: What was the strategy behind this attempt? What reasons did Florida have for attempting to secede? For what reason would North Carolina or South Carolina ally with Florida’s secession attempt?
I thought I would eventually learn some answers to these questions, or at least more hints about the overall conflict.
I was wrong.
The opening scene left me captivated, but also confused and wanting. These three feelings came to define my experience with the film, with the captivation disappearing upon walking out of the auditorium and the confusion and want lingering long afterwards.
There are some incredible, gripping sequences in the film. The battle sequences of armed forces fighting in ruined buildings and city streets are edited and shot masterfully to heighten immersion. The cinematography is frantic and emulates the experiences of the journalist main characters as they take photos right next to the armed fighters while trying to avoid getting shot. The sound design is perfect; every bullet and bomb blast hits the viewer’s chest with reverberations. The editing is rapid, constantly keeping the audience on edge. Never before had I believed the term “white-knuckle” to so accurately describe what I was watching. Never before had I experienced combat sequences in a modern war film that left me so shaken. I thought the 2008 film about the U.S. invasion of Iraq The Hurt Locker directed by Kathryn Bigelow and written by Mark Boal (a film that I think has significant flaws but that I still find compelling and admirable) was a masterclass in tension. Civil War, however, was even more nerve-wracking.
Even the scenes that don’t directly depict combat are beautifully constructed. There are so many shots meant to emulate expert photography, with striking use of central focal points, as well as consistent presentations of people and objects that aren’t in the foreground as out of focus. One shot that I vividly remember simply depicts two people sitting next to each other on the bleachers of a stadium that has been converted into an aid camp for people displaced by the conflict. The two people are the only ones in the shot, they are sitting far away from anyone else at the camp, but there is warmth and comfort in their faces. It is a beautiful image of the resilience of humanity and the capability of people to find community in the most dire circumstances.
On a technical level, the filmmaking is so skillful. It is with great disappointment that, in my view, the technical mastery merely serves a hollow story.
As mentioned earlier, there are the vaguest of hints about the conflict that has torn the United States apart for the second time. California and Texas have united to form the Western Forces. The only clues to explain why come in a brief discussion in which Lee and her journalist partner on their self-directed assignment, Joel (Wagner Moura) list the ways in which their current U.S. President has become a dictator. They mention disturbing details such as the President serving much more than two terms, and they compare him to Muammar Gaddafi. Joel and Lee plan to travel to Washington, D.C., to interview the President. Though the President might be the film’s villain, not once does the film (unless I completely missed it) reveal what the Western Forces’ plans for the country are or what their ideology is. Are they liberators, the lesser of two evils, a combination of both?
There were so many additional aspects of the film, including various scenes of combat, that similarly caused confusion due to the film’s commitment to provide next-to-no context. As I mentioned earlier, some of the firefights in this movie are incredibly tense. One that pinned me to my seat took place in the area outside and within a tall building. But, when the fight was over, I was left wondering who the people fighting were and what their reason for conflict was. Were they Western Forces fighting the U.S. Army? Were they a separate group entirely? Lee, Joel, and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), an aspiring journalist who idolizes Lee and whom Joel has allowed to join on their trip, are never once shown interviewing any of the combatants. They take brutal photos of the fight, but no interviews or written reports accompany these photos.
There’s another shocking sequence that, again, lacks vital context. The journalists stumble upon a man in fatigues brandishing a rifle (Jesse Plemons). The man and his associates are dumping bodies of people in civilian clothing into a pit. The man holds the main characters at gunpoint and kills several hostages before he is run over by a car. He kills those he deems as not American; his violence is the monstrous and inevitable conclusion of nationalism and racism. The scene is brutal and disturbing, rightfully so. But, again, once it is over, I am confused. I have no idea if the mass killer is associated with any of the major factions in the civil war. Perhaps he is not affiliated with anyone and has used the violent, chaotic circumstances as an opportunity to commit his heinous crimes. The film doesn’t suggest any one possibility or another, though his possible affiliation with either the Western Forces or the U.S. Army would no doubt impact how viewers react to the film’s final sequences.
The film’s lack of information about the world becomes ridiculous at certain points. In a scene that almost made me bury my face in my hands, the journalists stumble upon a showdown between snipers. Joel, now actually trying to do his job as a journalist, asks the sniper near him about the sniper’s faction, and how he ended up in this situation. The sniper merely says that someone is trying to kill him and that nothing else matters. When Joel asks the man again for details, the man calls Joel an idiot.
The film could have relied on environmental storytelling to flesh out the world. Surely, artifacts that people have left behind, such as journals, supplies, and documents, can provide context for the events in the film and deepen the story. The use of the environment to convey story was expertly done in Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 dystopian film Children of Men (which is one of my all-time favorite films and which will be the subject of a future discussion, I have no doubt). Garland could have borrowed similar techniques from Cuarón, but he didn’t. He scrubbed the environments of any clues that could have provided insights on the civil war. The environments at times felt unnatural and artificial, so devoid were they of any illuminating details.
In the absence of details about the world of the film, my investment cannot be placed anywhere. When the film ends with the Western Forces killing the President, I have no idea how to interpret this event. Is this a victory, or the first step in what might become a brutal new regime?
Is the film, in its refusal to present the ideologies and politics of the participants in its central conflict, providing a broad message about the brutality of war and the corrupting power of violence? Neither of these ideas are new, and I’m also disappointed that a film about a second civil war in the U.S. might have a basic message about violence being bad when the actual civil war in the U.S. was a tragedy that became inevitable when earlier measures to dismantle the institution of chattel slavery failed. Furthermore, I’m disturbed by this film’s refusal to engage in overt politics when the politics of the actual U.S. Civil War are still contested today, with historians that espouse a white supremacist agenda valorizing Confederate generals and downplaying the fact that the war was fought over slavery.
If Garland wanted to make a film that captured the experiences of war journalists in a modern setting and avoid politics, I wonder why he didn’t create an imagined country, similar to what Ralph Fiennes did in his superb modern-day adaptation of Shakespeare’s play Coriolanus. If Garland wanted to preserve the horrifying spectacle of the U.S. becoming a battlefield (which, I submit, could be a potent way to critique ideas of American exceptionalism), then could he have come up with a different conflict? Numerous television shows, books, and video games take place in an alternate history during which the Cold War escalates and the Soviet Union invades the U.S.; why couldn’t Garland have drawn from this scenario or a similar one that was much less contentious than a civil war?
If Garland wanted his film to be complex and not merely ideological, I commend that goal. However, scrubbing the film of politics is not the best way to do this, in my view. One of my favorite literary theorists, whom I was introduced to in undergrad, is the late Mikhail Bakhtin, whose concept of polyphony highlights a strategy Garland could have used to tell his story. According to Bakhtin, polyphony is the presence in a novel of multiple ideologies voiced by different characters; this is a virtue of the novel because the presence of numerous ideas prevents the novel from espousing one totalistic ideology. Bakhtin’s theory draws from the work of Dostoevsky. In Dostoevsky’s novels, different characters articulate and defend different views about the world. Even though Dostoevsky himself had a specific worldview, the presence in his novels of differing ideas allows his fiction to be complex and not be reduced to his personal soapbox.
Garland could have had his characters express or embody through actions various political or moral views. Instead, his characters are shallow, not much more than basic tropes. Lee is the hardened, world-weary professional who softens by the film’s finale. Jessie is the naïve newcomer who becomes hardened by the end due to what she has experienced and witnessed. Joel does what he does because it turns him on; he says as much on more than one occasion. Lee has a mentor, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who, as any mentor would do, provides wisdom. The actors all do their best, and their performances are good, but they aren’t given deep characters to work worth. None of the characters surprised me, none of them felt layered or complex.
Therefore, even when seeing this film as a story about the experiences of war journalists, it falls short due to its thin characters. The movie is ultimately about not much more than the hollow, horrible spectacle of war.
My tone in this discussion is harsher than it has been in any of my previous discussions, but this comes from a place of imagining what could have been. I know Garland can do better; I’ve seen him do better. His directorial debut, Ex Machina, involved an uncompromising condemnation of misogyny and patriarchy through the demise of one of the central characters, whose fault was seeing the protagonist Ava (Alicia Vikander, absolutely incredible in this role) as a damsel in need of saving instead of as a capable woman with her own desires and priorities.
Ex Machina was riveting, and it had something to say. As I mentioned in my discussion on Oppenheimer, every act of creation comes with responsibility, including the act of making art. Alex Garland was able to gather the resources to make a major film about a hypothetical second civil war in the U.S. He had an opportunity to say something important, or at least interesting. Instead, he gave us a shallow film. As disappointed as I am, I am interested to see what he does next. I hope his future work is more in line with Ex Machina: daring, uncompromising, and brave.
Great post! I especially like your analysis of the opening scene and your reference to Bakhtin
I like this take on the film. I personally liked the omission of ideology because I felt like it was a big unanswered question. Why is this happening? Why? Why? Why? And I took it as that the effects of war leveling us all to some degree. There are always going to be those trapped in between the violence and those who cannot really take sides (like the press, ideally). And somewhere in the violence, reason gets lost. It's not always a matter of strategy but simply survival. The scope of the individual's awareness shrinks. At least that's how I interpreted it. But I do agree that ideology would have greatly improved the characters and could have opened up doors for better plot as well.