Civil War (2024)

****/****
starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Nick Offerman
written and directed by Alex Garland

by Walter Chaw Haskell Wexler’s seminal 1969 film Medium Cool opens on a car accident. A woman in a grey-and-black striped dress has been thrown from the passenger side and is lying in the road. The car horn is stuck and blaring, and in the rearview mirror two figures approach: a man in a tight black T-shirt toting a 16mm camera, and his soundman, trailing behind with a directional microphone. They stalk around the wreckage. They find the best angles. The guy with the camera–the hero of the piece, John (Robert Forster)–spares a moment of pity for the woman after getting his footage. He and the soundman leave, and we hear distant sirens. They’re travelling, John and his colleague (Peter Bonerz), across a country torn by unrest at the end of the last progressive period in the United States–the wasteland our season of assassinations left behind, in which any vestiges of hope would soon curdle into the filth of Altamont and the Manson Family. They’re chroniclers, not participants. What is a single human lifespan compared to the life cycle of the perfectly eloquent photograph? What if you could keep telling your story after you died? What if the Democratic National Convention in 1968, where the party fractured over disagreements about how to handle an unpopular war and sent Chicago’s stormtroopers to beat students and protestors… What if this happened and no one was there to record how far we had fallen? What if the powerful were allowed to operate in the dark?

Alex Garland’s Civil War appears at a time in the real world when fascist states are killing journalists for chronicling their misdeeds while the media of other countries refuse to sound the alarm over it. We’ve never had much control of the historical narrative; now we have even less. Civil War feels like a Graham Greene novel in that sense–like The Killing Fields or The Year of Living Dangerously, where a group of world-weary, ink-stained wretches in worn khakis and white, sweat-yellowed workshirts gather in various blasted interzones to exchange war stories and engage in cynical witticism contests. There’s a scene towards the beginning of the film where veteran photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and her partner Joel (Wagner Moura) take stock of their situation in a no-fire hotel sanctuary in the middle of a free-fire zone. Dead-eyed, exhausted, half-deaf from a recent suicide bombing and furious at how they’ve spent their lives warning the United States not to let itself come to this and yet, here we are, Lee and Joel talk to Lee’s mentor, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), about how the only story left to tell in America’s second Civil War is the last words of a puffed up, three-term, self-installed dictator-cum-Commander-in-Chief (Nick Offerman). It feels like a scene out of The Quiet American or Saint Jack. It feels like inevitability, like prophecy, and it’s suffused with the nobility of duty and due diligence even at the end of the world.

Civil War is a celebration of journalists as they do the unromantic work of chronicling history as it repeats itself. It is a consideration of the role of mentorship in our brief, painful lives, a celebration of the righteous value of truth for its own sake as breadcrumbs left by lost children in a dark wood to mark that we knew. It made no difference for us, but it might for those who would follow. In its disinterest in the peculiarities of the war, the film reminds me a lot of John Milius’s Red Dawn, where, between hails of bullets and missiles, the small-town American terrorists who are the heroes of the piece don’t have time to ponder the identity or the goals of their occupiers. “Why” is for historians to comb through. In the moment, enough people decided they had a mandate to murder their neighbours and destabilize a nation founded on the tenuous handshake agreement that we were stronger together than apart. Documenting a violent protest that reminded me very much of the Chicago National Convention scene from Medium Cool, Lee saves the life of a young photographer, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), who subsequently attaches herself to Lee and her crew. Jessie wants to be Lee one day. Lee tries to talk her out of it. Lee, who knows her fate is to be a corpse that someone like Jessie takes snapshots of on her way to the next place where the guardrails holding entropy back have failed.

In the context of Garland’s filmography, Civil War is most like Annihilation: another quest film that leads a team of the depressed and quailing into eldritch territory. Lee’s plan is to head north up the Eastern seaboard to get to Washington D.C. (the “Tokyo” of this “Pacific Theater”), before the White House falls beneath the onslaught of the Texas/California confederacy. Along the way, they stop in a small, Faulknerian southern town that has chosen to ignore what’s going on around them, though they have an armed militia patrolling their rooftops and a deserted theme park where two teams of snipers face off across abandoned amusements. A large part of the horror and delight of Civil War is its glorious uncanniness: the introduction of one violent element that makes the ultra-familiar suddenly alien and threatening. All of it feels like the moment Becky Driscoll opens her black eyes after you kiss her in the mineshaft. When we encounter a terrifying soldier (Jesse Plemons) making his own decisions about the “right” kind of American who should be allowed to live, the real horror of it is the amount of empathy we feel for him at that point. How can I trust that any of you aren’t part of the cult that wants to kill me? How can you trust that I’m not part of the resistance that wants to put you in prison?

Civil War is about how at some point, once you can’t trust anything, you don’t even know if the person in front of you is a human being anymore. It’s about despair, about how we never learn anything and how our default setting as a political species seems to be violent ignorance, nationalism, and fascism. The end of Medium Cool finds our heroes broken, dying by the side of a road while descriptions of the chaos erupting around the country are read in breathless tones on a radio broadcast. It’s a warning told in images; what happens when the watchers of the watchmen are murdered in the execution of their duties? What happens when Ismael goes down with the Pequod? Civil War is careful to paint its heroes as true believers in their cause. They think their pictures will make a difference. They think they can prevent the death of a cult leader from turning into a martyrdom just by capturing how cowardly and self-serving are his last words. The power of Civil War is that it is at odds with its heroes. There is no hope in its vision of our near future. It doesn’t share its heroes’ faith that there is anything we can do in the age of missing information that will move the needle back from midnight. The power of Civil War is that its heroes are willing to die to prove that it’s wrong.