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Director:Alex Garland
Writer:Alex Garland
Stars:Nick OffermanKirsten DunstWagner Moura
Civil War Full Movie Review
This moment is indicative of the film as a whole, a robustly shot and performed movie that presents a scary and guiltily intriguing scenario and then defiantly declines to explore it. What we know is that at some point near-ish to our present day, a strongman president (played by Nick Offerman) likened to dictators like Pol Pot and Ceaușescu is seizing onto his power. A faction of rebels representing Texas and California (and I believe Florida, to some extent) have gone to war with the army loyal to the president. Journalists have been executed on the South Lawn of the White House; Philadelphia is a bloody no-go-zone; we see a terrorist bombing in New York.
That’s pretty much all the detail provided on Civil War’s odyssey through this war-torn land, a journey of vignettes depicting life during turmoil. Garland wants to keep things vague lest politics enter the picture; his film is meant to be a sober imagining only of this intra-American conflict’s on-the-ground mechanics. There is no attempt at sweeping moral righteousness beyond the simple precept that killing people is usually bad. Otherwise, Garland keeps his film as blank and objective as the photographers (and two reporters, played by Wagner Moura and Stephen McKinley Henderson) running around the battlefield, documenting a clash they have otherwise removed themselves from.
Civil War is not apathetic, exactly, but it is cynically detached from its likely inspiration. Garland didn’t decide to make this particular movie on an un-sourced whim; its very existence is a response to something hanging in the air. Yet he refuses to connect Civil War with that obvious context—which feels more like a cop out than high-minded restraint or elegant equanimity. That said, it is certainly Garland’s prerogative not to make January 6th the Sequel: Bigger, Longer, Uncut. I don’t know who would really want that anyway.
Civil War’s skittishness toward real-world allusion might be more tolerable, if still frustrating, had the film at least fleshed out its characters. To make up for a deliberately underdeveloped environment, the people moving through it could be designed to hold our attention. Yet Garland takes half measures there, too. Everyone is awfully opaque. We know that Lee is talented but weary, Jessie overly eager, Moura and Henderson’s characters stand on different ends of the adrenaline-junkie spectrum. We learn nothing about the motivation behind their work; their social dynamic is faintly mapped. They remain strangers to us, and so do their professions. (It is also curious that this film is so concerned with still photography; video cameras of any variety are barely seen in the film.) We eventually stop caring about what happens to these people; only the most basic and innate empathy remains.
There is one scene that inches the film toward something insistent and terrifying, a run-in with a soldier played with laconic menace by Dunst’s husband, Jesse Plemons. Here Garland manages true tension, partly because he lets slip a clue to the ideology guiding one of the warring factions. It’s a horror sequence set under a cheery sun by a babbling river, a dreadful contrasting of the natural world and the men who make a mess of it. The scene offers a glimpse of a better film, one probing and rattling in its depiction of a very real American animus boiling over into catastrophe.
