Civil War
The filmmaking style of Alex Garland’s “Civil War” is, in many ways, the negative image of Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest.” Both films deal with dehumanization and desensitization to the suffering of others, but where Jonathan Glazer’s film does this with absence and restraint, Garland’s assaults the viewer with nauseating intensity. Shaky camerawork enhances the you-are-there feeling of the film’s combat scenes, and every gunshot — and there are a lot of them — is mixed loud enough to make your ears ring.
It’s like an immersive experience of being in a war zone, which establishes a sort of battlefield camaraderie between the audience and the group of journalists who guide us through the Eastern part of the U.S. in the last days of a devastating civil war. The “Western Forces” of Texas and California and the “Florida Alliance” are closing in on Washington, D.C., and despite the confident tone of his daily radio addresses, the president (Nick Offerman) is expected to surrender any day now. The political dimensions of all of this are never explained, and are frankly irrelevant. It doesn’t matter how these states joined together, or why they seceded. What matters is what the ensuing violence has done to Americans as a whole.
In real life, America is growing crueler and more divided by the day, and the social fabric of the country is disintegrating along with its infrastructure. But “Civil War” isn’t a plea for empathy, or even civility. It simply follows this trend to its logical end point, which is a country where militiamen with automatic weapons shoot strangers on sight and torture their old high school classmates in the burned-out shells of abandoned car washes. Everyone who isn’t directly affected by the violence pretends it isn’t happening, in the name of “staying out” of politics — a stance that the film condemns more strongly than any.
As the story begins, veteran photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst) pulls reckless rookie Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) out of the path of a bomb that explodes at a water riot in New York City, killing around a dozen people. Following the deafening blast, the soundtrack goes silent as Lee gets up and starts calmly shooting photos of the bloody bodies on the sidewalk. She can’t be emotionally affected by what she sees, or she can’t do her job. But it’s still unsettling to watch her do it.
Jessie will receive a traumatic education in the life of a war correspondent over the next few days, as she tags along with Lee, her colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), and her mentor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) in their beat-up white press van on what’s technically a road trip — although that term seems a little too pleasant for what’s happening here. They set off on a roundabout route from New York to D.C. that takes them through Pennsylvania and West Virginia and finally down to Charlottesville, Virginia, the front line of a war that’s emboldened white Americans to execute anyone they deem an “other.”
This dynamic plays out in a scene that juxtaposes the warm yellow sunlight and delicate wildflowers of a spring day with a nightmarish tangle of bodies in a mass grave, overseen by a soldier played by Jesse Plemons whose whimsical red plastic sunglasses both contrast with and highlight his casual sadism. The film’s blaring needle drops have a similar effect: Pop music is usually fun, which makes its inclusion here disquieting, because there’s nothing fun about this film. It has some darkly surreal moments, sure. Maybe even a barking, joyless laugh or two. But it’s not fun.
“Civil War’s” lack of a political point of view, as well as its refusal to really identify the positions of its warring parties, has already become the subject of understandable criticism. But does any sane person really want a version of this film that attempts to spell out these people’s politics or, even worse, takes sides in its fictional conflict? I find the lack of “real world” political agenda being included here as maybe Garland’s best idea for this film. It allows us as viewers to focus on what I believe is at the heart of “Civil War”. That heart is in bringing the devastation of war home: Seeing American cities reduced to bombed-out rubble is shocking, which leads to a sobering reminder that this is already what life is like for many around the world. Today, it’s the people of Gaza. Tomorrow, it’ll be someone else. The framework of this movie may be science fiction, but the chaotic, morally bankrupt reality of war isn’t.
For the most part American have had the luxury of sitting on the sidelines throughout the world’s major conflicts. We haven’t had combat in our fields and cities since our actual civil war and I think Garland’s point is maybe we’ve become someone aloof when it comes to caring for other country’s people who don’t share that long stretch of peace. Beyond the plausibility of war in the United States or the tragedy of such an eventuality, it’s about the way we refuse to let images from wars like this get to us. It’s more a call for reflection, an attempt to put us in the shoes of others, than a warning — not an “It Can Happen Here” movie, but a “Here’s What It’s Like” movie. It doesn’t want to make us feel so much as it wants us to ask why we don’t feel anything.
