Civil War
If you come to Alex Garland’s Civil War without knowing anything other than the premise of the movie, then you won’t know much more when the movie ends in bloodshed about 110 minutes later. Garland has made a slick movie devoid of intention or real social commentary that wastes no opportunity to shock. Yet the lack of internal logic or real stakes undercuts some committed performances, and the final result is an unpleasant mix of self-seriousness and cliche.
We are told early on that the President of the United States (an underused Nick Offerman) is serving his third term, but we’re never told by what means that came to pass. While the war goes, the “Western Forces” - an alliance of Texas, California, and some other states that has no coherent agenda - advances on Washington D.C.. A team of journalists including well-known photographer Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) travel a roundabout route from New York to Charlottesville (where the rebels are massed) with hopes of interviewing the President before Washington falls. Accompanying Lee are her colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), an eminent New York Times reporter named Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), and a freelancer named Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) who views Lee as an icon.
Garland opens with an Presidential speech cut in with what looks very much like footage from the American protests of the last five years. The crass choice is indicative of what I’d argue is Garland’s bad-faith approach: he’s willing to appropriate imagery that has real political context and then throw that context out the window. He repeats the trick later with a shot of a man being set on fire that’s part of a flashback detailing Lee’s career in war zones. To the degree that anyone rises above this meticulous nonsense it’s Kirsten Dunst as Lee. Dunst is one of our most approachable movie stars; we instinctively want to feel what she feels. In Civil War though she withholds, burying her feelings about what she has seen underneath a layer of hard-won journalistic objectivity. Lee tries to teach Jessie the same lesson, and I wish the movie did more than signal that Jessie is taking Lee’s advice a little too much to heart. Civil War was shot before Cailee Spaeny made Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, and Spaeny seems to be here to stay.
So, what’s it all about? We’re given a few details about Offerman’s dictatorial President - he has disbanded the FBI, something no President could actually do without first disbanding Congress. That doesn’t explain why the rebels have military grade weapons, so there must have been a large scale revolt of the military that’s never discussed. Past that, Civil War has no coherent ideological bent and it isn’t even clear why as the character’s journey across supposedly loyalist territory that so many people seem to have been displaced from their homes. Or why Garland chooses to score an execution scene in which we don’t know who’s on what side with a De La Soul song. Civil War is a con job, too much style in service of nothing.