Civil War

Released 2024. Director: Alex Garland

AMERICA IS BEING RIPPED APART, A NATION AT WAR WITH ITSELF. At the start of the movie we see the President delivers some alarmingly authoritarian rhetoric. The scene is intercut with flashes of street violence. Citizens are killing citizens because they disagree. Over what, exactly? The movie never truly clarifies. No political affiliation is identified and no recent actions of the administration are divulged. We know little of the specifics, and yet this movie grips you like staring into a window of future history.

Just ten years ago a movie like Civil War would be seen as a total fantasy, a fictional depiction of an extreme scenario. What in the recent past would likely be a B-grade dystopian tale is today a chilling cautionary pronouncement. The movie is underwritten without giving us a full account of the genesis of the conflict and yet we feel we know enough. It doesn’t dwell much on the background and history because so much of the context is already understood. The basis for Civil War has been unfolding in real life in the last few years. Because we can vividly project what we see in this movie onto the real world, Civil War is no longer a fantasy but a vision of a palpable threat.

While parts of America are embroiled in bloody battles and other parts persist in denial, Texas and California (blurring the line between red and blue) join forces as the secessionist Western Forces against the unnamed administration. There’s also mention of a Florida Alliance embroiled in the nationwide conflict. Ordinary citizenry are locked and loaded waging their own war.

Against this backdrop, Kirsten Dunst plays Lee, a jaded and disillusioned war photographer having seen too much of the dark side of human nature. After another close shave with death, this time a suicide bombing in New York, Lee wants to make it to D.C. hoping to photograph the President hanging on to power in defiance.

Travelling with Lee on this potentially life-threatening drive is her reporter colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), veteran news editor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and an inexperienced rookie Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) who tags along despite Lee’s misgivings.

Together they traverse a ravaged country, battlegrounds marked by carnage and dead bodies. The intrepid journalists shadow rival militia in a fierce gun battle at a school that no longer serves its purpose. At a gas station they see grisly torture at close range. They come under sniper attack at an abandoned Christmas fair, which evokes the grim picture that children’s laughter is something that only existed in the past. They run into a couple of journalists before coming upon a mass grave full of dead civilians where an armed militia man (played by Dunst’s husband Jesse Plemons) quietly taunts them -- “What kind of Americans are you?” -- and then shoots two of them point blank. This horrific encounter underscores the extent of the lawlessness and anarchy that has taken over the country.

Through the eyes of these journalists we see a photographic record of a country in collapse. The horror and anguish they feel, especially when their colleagues are brutally murdered, is portentous of what everyday life will be like if (or when) a similar situation comes to pass in these once united states of America.

Civil War does not address the psychology or motivations of the people on either side of the divide besides a surface treatment of their brutal leanings. What the movie leaves you with is the idea of a fatally fractured America. The tragic consequences of polarisation and self-serving politics have a frightening realism, despite the story being fictitious and the movie slickly produced.

Lee and two others make it to the White House in the midst of a violent takeover. Photos of historical significance are captured as the carnage rages on. Even after seeing the brutal end to an American authoritarian’s regime, there is no sense of relief or catharsis because you have just watched a 2-hour trailer to a reality show coming soon to your own backyard.

Writer-director Alex Garland has dealt with disruptions of existential proportions in Annihilation and Ex Machina with terrific effect. Life and death, identity and rebirth are ideas embedded in his stories. Civil War may not offer strong arguments and clarity about the morality and beliefs behind the bloody conflicts, the disturbing depiction of what could be the (very) near future and the visceral reaction it brings on makes this a most sinister and unnerving horror movie.

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