From my point of view, Alex Garland is one of the newer mantle holders of cinematic Science Fiction and Dystopic fiction. After writing 28 Days Later and Sunshine, two 2000s-era bangers, he came into his own as a director of the films Ex Machina and Annihilation. Now, in 2022, he made a film I very much disliked called Men, which I felt was too on the nose, and others also didn’t care much for it either. With all that, once they started saying his next film would be a film about a second US Civil War, I must say, like many others, my interest was piqued. Why was my and others’ interest piqued, though? I think that the nature of our political system and news, along with people, is just so divided. Along with so many rights being attacked and battlegrounds being drawn, it feels like, in many ways, we’re in a cold civil war as is. You then take this filmmaker; people have respect for putting out a film like this in an election year – woo wee, you got one. Then, with the cherry on top, it’s an A24 studio release, a studio that right now, I feel, has more trust than even Disney does for theatergoers. So enough with all the preamble, let’s get into what Civil War is and what it isn’t.
Kirsten Dunst plays Lee, a seasoned war photographer (per the press notes) who is on a journey with Joel (Wagner Moura) to Washington DC to interview the President of the United States as the Western Forces, the leading secessionist group, are to invading the city for his surrender. Stephen McKinley Henderson plays Sammy, who they allude to working for the New York Times and is Lee’s mentor. He joins them as he wants to make it to the Western Forces to cover them. These three experienced pros end up with our POV character, Jessie, played by Cailee Spaeny, who is a young and inexperienced photographer who talks her way into joining the trip against Lee’s wishes. This put-together family unit of reporters travels through this war-torn United States, which brings to mind war documentaries or war movies of the past. Civil War went to great lengths to show how dire and destroyed society was, and it focused a lot on the importance of the Fourth Estate. The problem is that with so much focus on that and no real clarification of what’s happening around them, it leads too much to the imagination in choosing not to take a side politically.
Dunst plays Lee with great world-weariness and experience like leading men from the 1950s or 1960s. She works well with Spaeny on screen, which has a great Master teacher and young apprentice energy you’d get from a Western or classic kung fu movie. Speaking of Westerns, the film does have, at times, that feeling of traveling and interacting with people along the way, some of which are safe and others very much not so. It’s something that I feel is very much core to current American dystopias, primarily because of how much they love taking on the tropes of that genre to explore these ideas of our current society. The other characters on this journey, Joel and Sammy, are interesting characters who play against Lee. With Moura being a lot more reckless and, at times, like a sitcom dad in his foolishness, Moura, famous for playing Pablo Escobar in Narcos, can emote at some big core moments. He’s able to really bring home the gravity of the situations they find themselves in. Now, Henderson, who has been really getting some significant feature roles lately, is not surprising as the old wise man character. A character that Lee can go to for advice and also looks after Jessie in many ways. As I’ve said earlier, he’s the grandfather archetype in the family style band of adventurers and fits it well. He’s also the Black person in this group and usually has the most intelligent idea that the others don’t listen to.
This being A24’s first film for IMAX, Garland does an impressive job at making a film that does feel like the largest film in the studio’s history. The film uses the scale of the screen very well with very thrilling and, at times, disturbing war scenes. Some scenes will not be for everyone as they show a level of brutality that we rarely get in war films here. It wears its influences from war photography on its very bare sleeves. There were shots in this that I was literally trying to figure out how they did them and had to refocus on the film. The film looks very good, and each action setpiece feels very real and hard-hitting. Its biggest issue overall is how it chooses to be so unclear in its backstory that I feel that anyone in the political sphere can use this piece of work to say what they want. That’s the danger of his film being released at such a crucial point in an election year. Towards the end, it tries to make some allusions to one side, but by then, it’s too far along to make a statement. While I like Civil War a great deal, it’s the film’s unwillingness to pick a side that bothers me about this well-made film, but that maybe should be left to you all to decide what you think of it.
Score: B+
