Review: "Civil War" is challenging, confrontational, and shatteringly powerful
Alex Garland might just have made his masterpiece
When I matriculated at the University of Colorado in 2011, I did so as a double major in film studies and journalism, and spent my first three semesters taking classes in both disciplines. This may surprise those who know me now, as a PhD candidate in film who has published books of movie reviews and written and podcasted on movies and television for two-thirds of my life; but at the time, I had a real conviction that not only was journalism important, but that it might be a real, viable career path given my skillset as a writer. What scared me away was not any diminishment in my belief in journalism, but the way every class I took, and every Professor I learned from, made clear that this was an industry in its death throes. I have never been in classrooms filled with so much pessimism – a steady drumbeat of lessons about how the business model was collapsing, how local news was disappearing, how national news was being corrupted. There was important work to do for aspiring journalists, no doubt; but our Professors made it clear there might not be jobs for us to take where we might do that work. And this was half a decade before Donald Trump rose to power, and much of the American free press chose to roll over and become stenographers for liars instead of interrogators of truth. I wonder how dark those classrooms sound now.
I dropped the journalism major, and chose to focus on film, and ultimately on academia and scholarship itself. Yet the older I’ve gotten, the more I feel I understand those journalism professors I once learned from. I, too, am in a dying industry, pursuing a career in academia in a country where one of our two political parties wants to dismantle collegiate institutions entirely, while the other is largely apathetic to our existence. I long ago gave up on my dream of making money from writing film reviews or making podcasts, and made peace with letting those remain passions and hobbies. The forces of late-stage capitalism and democratic decline will come for us all, eventually, no matter our field; there is no ‘safe’ career path, at least not for things we really believe in. I still think about those journalism professors sometimes. If they saw the writing on the wall, if they knew the end was coming and that the enterprise of their life’s work was in existential jeopardy, why were they teaching it? What got them out of bed and in front of a lecture hall every morning? What was it they felt they were bequeathing to the young people in front of them? What will my answers be when and if I am in the same position?
These are also the kinds of questions on Alex Garland’s mind in Civil War, a movie about the import of journalism amidst the extremis of a collapsing society. It is a film about why and how people who chronicle the present do what they do when the existence of a ‘tomorrow’ seems almost unthinkable; a parable about people whose instincts tell them to snap a picture when confronted with the yawning chasm of the end times. Garland has written and/or directed several truly wonderful films – movies as strange, diverse, and provocative as 28 Days Later, Sunshine, Dredd, Ex Machina, and Annihilation – but Civil War is the one that convinces me he is a capital-g Great filmmaker, a cinematic artist of immense and enduring substance. This is a challenging, confrontational, and shatteringly powerful film – the best of 2024 so far, and one I don’t think I will be able to shake for weeks or months to come.
I also think it’s a film that will land with a thud for many mainstream audience members who go in expecting a grandiose piece of speculative fiction with detailed world-building that tells us exactly how America got from 2024 to whenever this movie takes place, that surveys the conflict from a 50,000 foot view and gives us ready-made answers for what ails us rather than prompting viewers to think and reflect. To be fair, one could argue that describes the movie the film’s advertising has sold, as the trailers, while not dishonest, are not a particularly straightforward representation of the film Garland has made; to be fairer, the gap between a film’s marketing and its actual totality and substance is functionally irrelevant. Movies are art, not products; we are not ‘owed’ anything, save a decent presentation of the film. It’s up to us to come in open for whatever we’re about to see, whether or not it is what we expect.
In the case of Civil War, Garland’s film isn’t so much about America today as it is an exploration of photojournalism, war photography, and the process, personalities, and culture of the people who perform such dangerous work. The focus is the job itself, studied under a scenario of real intensity and extremity. Where this intersects with America is in how Garland taps into the feeling that this grand democratic experiment of ours feels more contingent today than it has in nearly two centuries; the literal landscape of bloodshed, bullets, and fire the film’s characters chronicle on their way to Washington D.C. feels, emotionally, a lot like the world we’re living in now – a country breaking apart at the seams, crumbling and rotting from within. It is not the photojournalist’s job to hold our hands and tell us how we got here, or where we’re going next; their job is to be in the thick of it so that they might impart a piece of that reality to the survivors and onlookers – a piece without which we can never actually understand how we got here, or why it matters, or where we go next. Their job isn’t to fix society, but to bear witness, a step without which there is no contingency – just collapse. Garland knows this, and in its immediacy and laser-sharp point-of-view, his film reflects that ethos. The photojournalist does not owe you an explanation for why the world is on fire; their job is to make sure we see the flames, and vicariously feel the heat, enough that we might actually learn something from the burned husk left behind. Civil War may not be what many viewers expect going in, but it is resolutely, powerfully clear-eyed in its purpose, approach, and perspective.
Kirsten Dunst leads the cast as a famed photojournalist, Lee Smith, who has covered wars all around the world, and feels understandably despondent that her life’s work wasn’t enough to stop her homeland from plunging itself into the same kind of destruction. And yet, she still gets up, puts on the Kevlar vest, and rushes into the middle of the action to continue chronicling the horror. Civil War is, at heart, a great procedural, a story about a few days in the life of people with very interesting jobs; we see how they do the work, the unique kinds of personalities that work requires, the subcultures and fraternity that bind these people together. It just so happens this ‘day in the life’ is the worst, most brutal day these characters will ever experience.
Thank God, then, that Garland has Dunst to ground his film, to sell us on the reality of this person and her profession, and to make the awful intensity of this speculative future scenario feel so viscerally immediate. This is the latest in a long line of movies Dunst has starred in that simply would not work, at all, were it not for her presence (a line that includes The Virgin Suicides, Marie Antoinette, Melancholia, the best season of Fargo, and even the Sam Raimi Spider-Man trilogy – along with others I’m surely forgetting). Dunst carries into every role the weight of a full human being, which sounds simple until you watch an actor of her caliber work and realize how rare that feat really is. There is a fierce intelligence undergirding her performance here, but also a sense of wisdom and weariness, of pain we glimpse but never fully understand. Lee keeps getting up in the morning and picking up the camera and taking the shots, and she believes in the importance of that work to her core, but it just keeps getting harder, the further she moves through a world that stubbornly refuses to feel the weight of these images as much as she does. Cailee Spaeny, fresh off her astonishing breakthrough in last year’s Priscilla – and completely unrecognizable from her transformation there – plays a young photographer, Jessie, who idolizes Lee, and wants to learn from her. At first, Jessie is far in over her head; gradually, she summons the courage, conviction, and touch of madness that also drives Lee, and there the film, and its characters, finds the answer. The work always mattered; here comes a young person inspired enough to lift the weight from the shoulder of those who have too long been burdened by it. The despondency was real, but so was the bequeathment.
Like The Zone of Interest and Dune: Part Two, Civil War is a movie produced before Hamas’ attack on Israel on October 7th and Israel’s subsequent leveling of Gaza, but released in the middle of the war and indelibly colored by those real-world events. Gaza has been the deadliest conflict for journalists in decades; the Committee to Protect Journalists reports 95 dead, with more missing, injured, and arrested. Whatever Civil War has to say about America, it is also, unintentionally but inevitably, about this conflict too, underlining the importance of the work done by every journalist who has perished, and the many more who will continue to risk their lives. Because no matter how it feels or how horrible the images we see, we are not actually in the end times. Not yet. 33,000 are dead in Gaza, but two million more are struggling to survive; the pictures, videos, and reports that manage to reach the outside world are the only hope to generate enough global pathos to stop further bloodshed. That work is the razor thin line holding back genocide.
The behavior of the characters in Civil War is extreme and sometimes off-putting, even alien to us in its inherent danger and the uncomfortable sense of deadly voyeurism, but nobody snaps pictures in the middle of gunfire just to get their rocks off. They do so because at any moment they might snatch from chaos the single image that shakes somebody, somewhere, out of apathy; the one that stops enough of the public in their tracks to change the course of the conflict, or, failing that, the one that contextualizes and immortalizes the moment for history. Even if we are lost, maybe the ones who come next will find their way. There is a faith inherent to that action that almost rises to the level of religious reverence, a belief in something we cannot see but want to make possible. At the outset of Civil War, these people almost seem disturbed, photographing devastation straight from the epicenter. By the end, there is no mistake: I felt absolute humility before their ethos, in the face of their faith. The world may indeed be crumbling, but here are the people who understand what that means deeply enough to chronicle it, to do something about it, to believe so strongly in the possibility of our capacity to be rocked by those moments that they risk their lives attesting to it. When Civil War cuts to credits, at the absolute perfect moment, it has made its point with iron-clad precision; you are either stirred, humbled, and awed by what it’s trying to tell you, or you weren’t receptive in the first place. But we always toil, we always teach and strive and snap photos and tell stories and make art, out of the faith that receptivity exists. It has to, or we really are lost.
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