Civil War Tedium

On Alex Garland's 'Civil War'

I entered the empty theater in Brooklyn very much wanting to like Alex Garland’s Civil War. It was one of the last days my neighborhood theater was going to play the film and I wanted to make sure I saw it; the mere fact that it wasn’t based on any prior intellectual property intrigued me. The reviews were solid. The trailer was compelling. Ticket sales had been unexpectedly robust, as blue and red audiences alike flocked to a film with a premise that seemed to confirm all of their worst suspicions: the United States is cracking up for good.

What I found, instead, was a well-shot, well-acted, and mostly tedious movie. It left me cold, in the way most recent movies have, and it reminded me that one of the last times I felt a genuine stir of emotion absent human interaction or the printed word, it was watching HBO’s The Last of Us a year ago. The test of a great movie is if you can stand to watch it twice or three times. I’d pluck two scenes out of Civil War, perhaps, and gladly skip the rest.

The premise is compelling enough. Lee Smith, who (very coincidentally) shares a name with the Hall of Fame closer, is an acclaimed photojournalist spending time in New York with her colleague, Joel, and a rival New York Times reporter, Sammy. They all report on war zones, and the war zone is America. The president (Nick Offerman) is a dictator barely hanging on in term three. The nation, by now, has fractured into four camps: the Loyalists, the Western Forces, the Florida Alliance, and the New People’s Army. New York, along with the rest of the Northeast and a chunk of Middle America, is loyalist territory. The Western Forces is an ideologically incoherent alliance of Texas and California. While photographing a bombing in Brooklyn, Lee (Kirsten Dunst) meets Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), an aspiring photojournalist who worships her. Lee, world-weary and hard-bitten, isn’t much interested in her company. They meet again at a hotel, where we learn Joel (Wagner Moura) and Lee plan to head to Washington D.C. to photograph and possibly interview the president before he is deposed. The elderly Sammy needs a ride down south, too, and they decide to bring him. Against Lee’s wishes, Jessie talks Joel into joining their press truck, even though she’s inexperienced.

Civil War thrives as a combat movie, as a spectacle—the visuals really can’t be argued with. Highways are strewn with abandoned cars. Bleeding men, half-dead, hang from carwashes. Fires crackle everywhere. Guerilla-style warfare rages in American towns. Lee, long a master of suppressing emotion and separating herself from the humanity of her subjects, needs to photograph all of it. She and Joel are quite literally in the line of fire, trailing soldiers as they shoot at each other in abandoned buildings. It’s never quite clear why the two journalists with a very obvious assignment—photograph and interview the president of the United States—must depart on these side missions, but Garland probably liked the scenery and time needed to be filled, somehow. Corpses pile up. Two other journalists are eventually executed by a xenophobic solider (Jesse Plemons). Jessie, no longer green, learns what it means to be a war photographer.

Garland wants us to know, in some form, it can happen here. The crumbling of governments and attendant urban warfare have long been the realities of parts of Africa and the Middle East, as well as Haiti. Could a slick filmmaker even capture something as harrowing as gang-ravaged, lawless Port-au-Prince circa 2024? Civil War works, to a degree, because American audiences, giddy with performative dread, get to imagine societal collapse right here. The film is at its best when it lingers on the mundanity and inanity of life in a ruined nation. One quaint town, patrolled by snipers, can pretend nothing much is happening at all, tuning out news from the battlefield. Other soldiers can shoot at each other without any rationale. Joel demands to know, during one shootout, why they’re trying to kill each other. The solider calls Joel retarded.

Civil War didn’t need an enormous amount of exposition or a politics rooted in our contemporary life—Garland is free to imagine the U.S. riven into fours, California libs and gun-loving Texans linking arms—but it required a deeper sense of the world and its people to succeed. Dystopias should have invention and forethought, a consideration of how collapse came and what living under it is really like: politically, psychologically, and culturally. If dystopian film and literature aren’t always novel—the post-apocalypse long ago became kitsch—they work when they transcend their stock images and moods. And this requires effort, particularly when politics, so grubbily, is dangled in front of the audience. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road need not concern itself with regional alliances and the instability of U.S. currency; it is enough for us, on the road with father and son, to confront the horrors of environmental extinction and human savagery and ponder how love, through such a hellscape, can endure. The wondrous and brutal prose locks us in. The equivalent, to me, is not the film version of the novel—good enough, though not as memorable—but the aforementioned television series, The Last of Us, which has now set the standard for post-apocalypse film and TV. Its episodes, including the pilot, are among the most gutting I’ve ever watched, and its showrunners, Craig Mazin and Neil Druckmann, manage to counterbalance wanton violence and gore—a fungus virus has turned most humanity into the equivalent of mindless, cannibalistic zombies—with starling intimacy. Nick Offerman is in The Last of Us too, this time as a survivalist who learns small utopias can still be carved out if you have years with the person you love. Civil War never nears such tenderness—the closest is the mentor-mentee relationship of Lee and Jessie—and it stumbles by offering the performance of politics and little more.

It does matter why people are shooting at each other. If Garland wants to offer a dorm room exegesis on the universality of human conflict—we’re all tribal, we’re all stupidly trying to kill despite our humanity!—he’s welcome, but there actually is a difference between what’s happening in Syria and Gaza, Haiti and Sudan. Racial, ethnic, and religious war springs from centuries of singular resentments, machinations, and myth—in other words, history. Civil War is intentionally, and foolishly, ahistorical. We have no idea why the United States failed. We have no idea why the country is now split into four factions. We have no idea what the culture truly resembles, if network TV still exists, if professional sports are played, if celebrities still captivate crowds. We have no idea how the American mainstream media, which in our world bleeds cash despite operating in the richest country on Earth, is able to survive a civil war and cut checks—never mind that we are told, in one scene when Lee tries to pay for gas, American currency is so worthless all the marauders now prefer Canadian cash. (Joel works for London-based Reuters and Lee, presumably, still photographs for Magnum, so perhaps only foreign-funded outlets remain.) In the film’s climax, the firefights are now in D.C., the rebel military—the Western Forces, why?—closing in on the White House. They’re going to kill the president. Lee wants her photo, Joel wants his quote. The implication is that they are journalists doing their duty but also in it for glory and ego-gratification, to slay the competition. As a working journalist, I get it. And I don’t—when America as we know it no longer exists, why does it matter if you’re the first to a photo or a quote, or if you’re standing above the other withered media corpses, declared the very best in a collapsed country? Garland isn’t interested in excavating this any more, asking tougher questions about the durability of the ego-drive amid chaos. There’s a Lincoln Memorial to immolate, a White House to shoot up.

Absent politics and culture, the audience is left with a mildly entertaining post-apocalyptic road movie that fails to distinguish itself in a crowded genre. Perhaps there’s commentary buried in here about how local journalists cover their own country’s undoing—the Haitian who bravely reports from war-torn Port-au-Prince—but that never comes to the fore, nor does any meditation on why modern societies unravel. There’s a liberal wailing, somewhere, it’s Trump, it’s Trump, his people want the civil war! and there’s enough criticism of the film that falls along partisan lines, since it is undeniable Jan. 6 happened and most people who love guns also love Donald Trump. Jan. 6, though, did not bring America to the brink of dissolution, no matter how much MSNBC might tell you otherwise. These weren’t the Western Forces in the Capitol, tanks and machine guns in tow. The insurrectionists were deranged, confused, and sad individuals who quickly met the might of the federal government. Garland is free to conceive of his own reality, his own civil war, America blown apart in some other fashion. A riot at the Capitol certainly didn’t end a 248 year-old country. Disunion, of the 1860s-sort, could always wait in our future, and the course of events are unpredictable enough to keep all sorts of debilitating scenarios in play. Artists needn’t prognosticate nor practice politics. They merely have to imagine, and imagine well. Civil War can’t—or won’t.