Written and directed by Alex Garland
Seeing our familiar and safe life turned into what we see on news reports from a war-torn country far away inspires a morbid fascination. Suicide bombers at downtown protests, downed military helicopters in a JC Penny parking lot, local football stadiums turned into refugee camps – it’s an uncanny reality both relatable and unbelievable at the same time.
Evoking the uncanny is a talent Alex Garland has. From presenting us with Ava in Ex Machina, an artificial being who walked, talked, and moved like a human being but seemed to be missing some essential ingredient, to taking us inside the shimmer of Annihilation, where our trauma was projected onto the natural world in strange ways beyond our conscious understanding.
Civil War has this quality too. Its warfare is not bombastic and grandiose the way many probably suspect a war would play out. No, it’s a draining slog broken up by abject terror as human life’s suddenly put on a knife’s edge and most often snuffed out with an irrationally dispassionate ease. The streets are for the most part quiet, the stores and homes abandoned, and those left out here are those who seem to welcome the end of civilization because they were never fit for it.
That is Civil War’s greatest strength. The hope for a return to normalcy is long gone, our image of ourselves as a people striving for a better tomorrow shattered. Garland’s characters don’t look to the skies, they look dead ahead in a 1,000-yard stare or find a thrill in the absurd state of things. Among them is Kirsten Dunst, who plays Lee, a famed war photographer, and she embodies the former, while her journalist partner Joel (Wagner Moura) shows us the latter.
In what seems the tailend of this modern civil war, they’re heading to Washington D.C. to interview the president. Why they think that’ll happen is not explained, but journalists have an irrational confidence that’s often necessary to succeed. Jessie, a young photojournalist played by Cailee Spaeny, manages to join them on this dreadful road trip, making her the lens through which Garland realizes the stakes, as she’ll inherit this scorched earth.
It’s a simple storyline that begets a simple film, and Civil War doesn’t provide much more than the morbid fascination of the movie’s premise. Its characters are husks, its writing stalled somewhere between shock humor and high school drama, and out of sight is a compelling human element amidst all the carnage.
It makes for bloodless bloodletting, and once the initial intrigue of this shitty new world wears off, it’s a surprisingly tedious movie as well. Only one scene grabs you right by the throat, and you can thank Jesse Plemons for that. It’s rare to see someone show up, do their thing, and then leave the rest of the movie in their shadow, but Plemons does it.
Civil War might be Garland at his most misanthropic. The people in his movies were never saints by any stretch, but they at least wanted something better, either for themselves or someone else. They cared, on some level. His latest film has none of that. People aim to put a bullet in what’s in front of them, and as our protagonists, Lee and Joel reduce themselves to mere stenographers too far gone themselves to even try to question things.
Garland takes a promising premise and does what’s expected of him without elevating it. The result is a tolerable ride-along where the weird banality that comes with war’s dehumanizing effects is enough of a curiosity to keep you watching even as investment has long since evaporated. Maybe this is the anti-war movie we deserve.
Mikkel Frederiksen 