What to do with Alex Garland's Civil War?
How A24's new blockbuster aims for the apolitical, and ends up with nothing
A fortnight ago, A24 secured their highest ever debut weekend, persuading the American public to part with $25.7 million to see Alex Garland’s Civil War. Across the Atlantic, I joined the hordes.
However, my attendance was a result of curiosity, rather than anticipation. I love most of what Garland – who has sprinkled his psychic, sci-fi horror over Ex Machina, Never Let Me Go, 28 Days Later, and Annihilation – has done. Yet I hesitated before buying a ticket.
Perhaps it was the underwhelming trailer, or post-awards season fatigue, but I just wasn’t exited. Nonetheless, driven by fealty to Garland, and glowing to favourable reviews, I slinked off to a late Sunday evening showing.
Civil War follows a troupe of four journalists, headed by wartime photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and reporter-come-heartthrob Joel (Wagner Moura) as they navigate a civil war-ravaged USA, driving to Washington D.C. to photograph the fascist “President” (Nick Offerman).
I left before they’d reached Washington state. For only the second time in my life – the first being when the joke of Cats had worn unbearably thin – I chose an extra hour reading my book over getting to the end credits. I was not impressed.
As an example of filmmaking, Civil War is fine. Garland has always had a knack for the shocking, and the film is well stocked with harrowing set-pieces. A protest suicide bombing here, a close-quarters firefight there, all immaculately tense and gorgeously rendered. The film, shot digitally, looks great.
But, my word, are the characters uninteresting. Alongside tortured soul Lee and eye-candy Joel, we have the paint-by-numbers, grizzled but kind old-timer Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and “she reminds me of you when you were younger” upstart Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). And if we ever forget which template each character is based-on, one of the others is there to flatly say it. “You’re old”, “you’re crazy”, “you’re inexperienced”, etc.
And what do we get with this no-dimensional foursome? A road movie, enduring unending and functionless conversations, briefly punctuated by seemingly random violence. One pit-stop natter, in which Jessie shows Lee her photos, ends with Dunst flatly saying, “That’s a good photo,” just in case we missed the point.
So, no plot, rotting characters, and Ron Swanson as a fascist overlord. But none of these are the reason I so disliked Civil War. I walked out because, quite simply, it had nothing to say.
In the press leading up to Civil War’s release, Alex Garland repeated how he wanted to make an apolitical film; how in this divisive political climate, he didn’t want to contribute to the ever-growing chasm between “right and left”.
It is an admirable aim which, in my opinion, was woefully achieved.
We, the audience, are plonked in the middle of this conflict. We are given no clue as to its beginnings, or any idea of the ideologies or perspectives at play. Soldiers and militia on both sides rarely speak, preferring to execute unarmed prisoners, or gruesomely murder gas thieves.
Our experience is mediated by our four neutral observers, who simply document the atrocities. Not once do they, or the events they undergo, ever question: why?
The closest we get to some idea of perspective comes in a scene where the journalists are trapped alongside two militia, pinned down Hurt Locker-style by a sniper in a nearby building. When asked why – imagine that – they’re shooting at this person, the militia’s reply is: he’s shooting at us.
It’s a great scene – the other standout alongside Jesse Plemons’ brief turn as a gun-toting MAGA-psycho – which briefly turns the gaze onto our voyeurs. It questions the disconnect between those engaging in history, and those supplying us with facts of that engagement. It attacks the apolitical viewpoint itself, and stands out because of it.
This begs the question, why set an apolitical film in a civil war at all?
Civil War, as a road movie depicting the horrors of war and American existentialism, is a spiritual sibling of Apocalypse Now. Yet Francis Ford Coppola’s similarly imperfect film, set in the middle of the Vietnam war, is overtly political. In fact, before, during, and after its production, Coppola preached his political aspirations for the project, proudly asserting it would be the first movie to directly tackle America’s involvement in Vietnam.
Civil War does the same, but retreats to apoliticism. I am not asking for an Oliver Stone-esque rhetoric. I don’t think all films should nail their colours to the mast. But absent any political content, Garland fails to offer a perspective on anything else. There’s no insight into the structures of power, how division is created, the similarities between right and left, nothing. He just heightens the real tensions of today, and leaves them blissfully unexplored.
Our experience is mediated by our four neutral observers, who simply document the atrocities. Not once do they, or the events they undergo, ever question: why?
Garland leans heavily on placing usually “foreign” imagery in the American backyard. UN Peacekeepers set up camps in West Virginia, suicide bombers target New York streets, national monuments are surrounded by military vehicles.
These are visceral sights, but absent any thematic content from the rest of the film, it’s unclear what purpose they serve beyond shock. Is the aim of the film to point out division and fascism result in warfare? Because if so, no shit.
It also seems naïve to aim for apoliticism at all. One of the first things we were told in my undergraduate media studies class was that all media, and in fact everything, has political overtones. Even Jon Ronson’s Things Fell Apart podcast series, which seeks to neutrally unpack the origins of today’s culture wars, expresses some level of progressive ideology.
But Ronson succeeds in creating something (mostly) apolitical by focusing on people’s individual experiences, the very humanity Garland fails to prioritise.
Adam Curtis said, on the Red Scare podcast – I can hear the collective eye roll – that culture is rarely good at analysing the current moment, but often good at expressing it. This, I feel, is Civil War’s undoing. It has aestheticised indifference, capturing the awareness and proceeding compartmentalisation of the horrors of the world to which all of us are guilty.
In shooting for the apolitical, I feel Garland made a movie about nothing.
Perhaps I’m being uncharitable, perhaps I had expectations which the director did not promise. Perhaps the third act, which I chose to avoid, tied up all these dangling threads. But I had seen too many cuts to drooping American flags for one Sunday evening. It just wasn’t worth it.
Really enjoyed this.