Some films are too big to fail, some are too small to succeed, and Civil War hits a boring middle ground between the two.
Writer-director Alex Garland is no newbie to taking on near-future hypotheticals that cash in on realistic fears. His work has even been prescient at times: in 28 Days Later (2002), a disease causes empty streets and for the world to become hermits; Ex Machina (2014) (one of my favorite films ever) chillingly ponders over the question of sentience within artificial intelligence that we grapple now with more than ever. In Civil War though, Garland seems to be stuck in a gray area of not wanting to feed into realism so much so to reveal some ulterior political motive but does not lean into a surrealistic take on war (a la Apocalypse Now [1979]) that could provoke full-throated interpretations from all members of the ideological spectrum. Instead, Civil War is a nothing film that refuses to be thought-provoking but simultaneously encourages the audience to trust its vision when there is not one.
Civil War is led by Kirsten Dunst as the legendary war photojournalist Lee Smith. Along with her is Joel (Wagner Moura), an adrenaline-junky that feeds off the novelty of every shoot, and Sammy (Stephen McKinley), a physical embodiment of cautious legacy media. The film starts, and we get all the visual exposition we need to understand each character. Lee is hardened; she may as well be a veteran herself. Joel does not know when to stop pushing; this includes agreeing to allow young photojournalist Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) to tag along with them, even though she proved her unpreparedness after having to be saved by Lee in a near-death mob experience; worst of all, one that she did not even get pictures. And Sammy is a foil that tells the band of photographers that they are constantly overstepping the limits of what is safe.
The film quickly transitions into a road-trip structure, similar to that of Alexander Payne’s Nebraska (2013), where each stop provides a moment for character-building or excitement. The stakes are just as high as the trip is far; the President (Nick Offerman) has agreed to give Lee and Joel what will likely be his final interview before being assassinated by the Western Forces. The Western Forces are a confusing amalgamation of states, including partisan polar opposites California and Texas, that have banded together to take down an autocratic leader who had just decided to take a third term in office. Beyond that, though, the motivations are vague. No character, main or extra, has a clear impetus for their actions beyond the primal instinct of how one guerilla military man describes it: shooting back merely because they are shooting at you. Survival is the name of the game in Civil War, and it is a lazy alternative to actually fleshing out who the war’s actors are and what they are fighting for. We get to the final scene (which I will not spoil even though it is predictable), and there is an uneasy sense of indecision of what to do in a post-revolution world. It is a fitting tone for the conclusion of the film’s aimless narrative.
Lee warns Jessie that as they get to each stop in their trip from New York City to Washington D.C., it will only get more dangerous. At one gas station, Lee has to bribe its defenders with an obscene amount of Canadian dollars just to refill their tanks. This is a world where America seems to be isolated and has lost its superpower status. One of the militants at the gas station walks with Jessie as she explores the location and finds two men strung up to an automatic car washer. But to her surprise, they are alive and Jessie’s comfort of knowing that they are potentially in a peaceful afterlife turns to the realization that they must endure more of the living hell that is Civil War’s America. And the chaos of the country is infectious; another stop on the trip is a town that seems frozen in time and unaffected by the war. Joel sarcastically asks the cashier at a clothing store if she knows a war is going on, and she just responds that they do, but that it is more convenient to ignore it. Nonetheless, Sammy points out to Lee that the town is similarly under covert military control to protect this unpenetrated “peace.” Then there is the famous Jesse Plemons sequence that captured my attention in what was generally a sorry trailer. Plemons plays a sadistic, rogue militant in a similar vengeful manner to his Todd from Breaking Bad, but the entire exchange was essentially revealed in the previews and has little in surprises otherwise. Plemons also serves as a forced and cringe-inducing symbol of current America’s real partisanship when he evaluates who to kill based on what region they are from and chooses to kill a foreigner without deliberation. Not even FOX News would endorse this mentality.
Every one of these storyline checkpoints does nothing to invest the audience further into the narrative, though. They serve as mandatory moments of action, where clarification on the context behind this war never expands, and the characters remain as they were when they were first introduced. And maybe Garland intended to keep a close hand on why this war was happening because he felt it did not matter and that the Darwinian ethos of each mini battle that the cast endures was better left untouched. But it comes off as a film with so many ideas and propositions that wants to put the responsibility on the audience for developing them. Garland seems to voluntarily give up his creative agency in defining what this film even is.
It is disappointing to see a film this ambitious feel half-baked. It displays a perspective that is barely shown in war films. Most war films focus on the soldiers and victims and treat the complementary figures like medics, photojournalists, etc., as invisible, so to see war from a third-party lens (pun intended) is fresh. This is especially so in the captivating way that each military exchange is edited; scenes of activity are interspersed with still photos from the photographers capturing it. The general lack of score, sound and music in these sequences forces the audience to focus on the tactical nature of them as well. All we can hear are bullets, directives and the snapping of cameras. It is truly raw and gripping. But I cannot say that about most of Civil War, which is content to bloat itself with downtime and dialogue that goes nowhere.
Civil War is barely 100 minutes long but it feels double that because it does not capitalize on what it does creatively well. Garland opts for structural monotonous redundancy: fight, reflect, stop and talk, repeat. Consequently, character arcs and plotlines become spoon-fed to completion in order to get through the overarching plot. I have to believe that Civil War was murdered in the editing room because of how loosely impactful each scene feels on one another, but this is the film I watched and this is the film that I wish I did not.
