Civil War (Preview)
Reviewed by Michael Sandlin

Produced by Andrew MacDonald, Allon Reich, and Gregory Goodman; directed by Alex Garland; screenplay by Alex Garland; cinematography by Rob Hardy; edited by Jake Roberts; music by Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury; production design by Caty Maxey; costume design by Meghan Kasperlik; starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sonoya Mizuno, and Nick Offerman. Color, 109 min., 2024. An A24 release.

Anyone taking even a casual glance at America today would see a country ruled not by politicians but by corporate and private online media partisans, including bloggers, podcasters, and the corporate “news” industry, all reaping massive profits from political apartheid. The word from our rogue’s gallery of myth-pushers in the media nowadays is that our Republic is heading straight for a second Civil War. But what will this seemingly inevitable brother-against-brother redux actually look like? Will the wretched Open Carry Heartland Militia survive the lethal barbed insults of the Coastal Elite Task Force? More importantly, who will burn Atlanta (home of CNN, hint, hint) this time? 

Entering into this fray is Alex Garland, a conceptually ambitious but middling British writer/director, just off the grotesquely convoluted mess that was Men (2022; see review in Cineaste, Winter 2022). Garland and his macchiato-fueled hipster overlords at A24 needed a big, big hit. And with Civil War, they found a foolproof way to reap beaucoup box office returns from America’s media-manufactured political divide. Unfortunately, Garland’s latest is a lackluster rush job that nevertheless perfectly exploits the now globalized notion of America as a self-hating nation of rabid Rottweilers trained by their media masters to kill on command. It’s not hard to imagine the beardy, handlebar-mustachioed A24 pitch meeting: “Hey bro, why not make an ‘art’ movie with blockbuster ambitions that exploits the political division in America but doesn’t appear to take sides in the conflict?” The intention, of course, being to capture the hearts and minds (and wallets) of MAGA country and Woke America alike. 

After the critical success of his first feature, Ex Machina (2014) Garland’s increasingly abstract conceptual ventures as a writer have proven way too lofty for his dead-average directorial skills, as we saw in Men: a film that reduced the great Jessie Buckley to a one-dimensional Fay Wray-type damsel in distress. Despite its genius publicity coup, Civil War is a sadly wasted opportunity to advance the aesthetics of the modern war film, not to mention a lost opportunity to do some hard thinking about America’s highly anticipated dark future.

From the first jazzy Lalo Schifrin-esque beats that accompany the film’s opening panoramic shot of Manhattan’s Legoland skyline, we know we’re in for a predictable Garland dystopic vision marked by detached ironic cool and hyperstylized go-go nihilism. And it’s here in the Big Apple, where we’re dropped into the midst of some messy urban crisis in which angry crowds are clashing with cops guarding water trucks (presumably the artesian water ran out long ago, as did the Cronuts). It’s in this random conflagration that we first meet two of the film’s journalist protagonists who show up to record the mayhem: reporter Joel (Wagner Moura) and photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst), both of whom ostensibly work for Reuters, although Garland leaves this working relationship weirdly oblique. 

And it’s in NYC where we first see Lee reflexively spring into action with her expensive rig, popping dramatic stills of the bloodied bodies lying in the street after a random car bomber strikes. It’s also at this point that Lee spots a young camera-wielding woman getting clubbed by a cop and rushes to help. It’s Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a twenty-three-year-old amateur war photographer who recognizes Lee and realizes she’s competing on the same gore-soaked turf as one of her photojournalist heroes.

Then we cut to an interior shot of some random NYC hotel, where the problems for the war correspondents in residence are clearly a bit more pedestrian than those of the parched mob outside: occasional power cuts and slow upload speeds plague the party-hardy journalists waiting for their next assignments. It’s here that we get the first inkling that Lee is a jaded burnout who has seen too much and desperately needs an all-inclusive resort vacation after decades of war coverage. Come to that, how long has this pesky war been going on, anyway? Garland clearly thinks we can’t handle this truth. 

Lee has been covering the American conflict since she was in college: after all, she cut her teeth on the infamous “Antifa massacre.” (Said “massacre” is one of many empty signifiers in the film, simply meant to leave any whiff of polarizing politics tantalizingly ambiguous.) Joel, meanwhile, is the hard-drinking, chain-smoking Hunter S. Thompson of the group, yet his predictable gonzo antics can never be confused with any actual comic relief. This ragtag gaggle of journos are planning what would seem to be a suicidal rogue mission—an 857-mile SUV trek to Washington, DC to cover what could be the president’s last days in office. They reluctantly agree to let an old acquaintance, aging New York Times reporter Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), join them, because it might be his last hurrah as a war reporter. Then, just as the threesome is about to hit the road, Joel waylays Lee with the news that they’ll have a fourth passenger—it’s budding combat shutterbug Jessie, whom Joel has allowed to tag along to get work experience. Needless to say, Lee is not happy with the added company nor the sudden prospect of having female competition. “I wanna be a war photographer,” Jessie says with unsettling nonchalance (like she had said “park ranger” or “fashion designer”). 

The SUV journey’s episodic nature has a strangely familiar Apocalypse Now-meets-Grand Theft Auto feel to it. But in Civil War there is no compelling Kurtz-like carrot-on-a-stick backstory to keep us interested, as it did throughout Captain Willard and crew’s increasingly brain-frying random encounters upriver. Nevertheless, Smith and her gripey colleagues head off into America’s own special Heart of Darkness, on a road trip (filled with cringey amateur-dramatics dialogue) that takes them to DC via the “scenic” route—the main highways are blocked—which seems to be through West Virginia and “west of Pittsburgh.” In other words, flyover-state hell-on-earth. 

But since we know nothing about Civil War’s president (played by Nick Offerman) other than that his wooden demeanor is slightly reminiscent of Al Gore, why should we care what happens to him? Lee and her press pals never even mention his name (he’s just the “president”). Have we gotten to a point in America’s future where politics has become so uncool that no one even knows the president’s name? We do know that Garland’s POTUS has autocratic ambitions and has wedged himself in the oval office for a third term (who does he think he is, FDR?), but we don’t know anything about his political affiliation. Sure, we can take an educated guess that he was once a moderate who took a despotic turn (he disbanded the FBI, something Trump has always been in favor of) and triggered a wave of violent secessionism. Out of this strife has emerged the Western Alliance, which we’re told is made up of the non sequitur pairing of Texas and California as a co-op of secessionist states—another grand obfuscation from Garland—with the Carolina and Florida Alliances closely backing them. They’re all closing in on government forces protecting the president in a “race to Berlin” moment in the war (although we’re told that “Charlottesville” is the erstwhile “front line”—yet another empty signifier)…

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Michael Sandlin is a U.K.-based writer and academic.

Copyright © 2024 by Cineaste, Inc.

Cineaste, Vol.  XLIX, No. 4