Written and Directed by Alex Garland
**** (four stars)
RATED R
I do not know about you but for each day that remains before the next Presidential election, it feels to me more and more like a ticking doomsday clock.
Dear readers, I have the suspicion that I have voiced sentiments similar to the one I am about to deliver...but in case I have, here we go again. I am devastated by how every election cycle has become "the most important election ever." Now, this is not to suggest that I feel that we have existed within a sense of hyperbole. On the contrary, I believe that every election cycle since President Barack Obama's victory in 2008, has raised the stakes. I remember on the night of his historic glass ceiling shattering win that pundits were already remarking that we now live in a "post racial society." As I heard those words, I instantly scoffed and said to myself, "It's going to get worse."
I never imagined how much worse.
For almost 10 years, we have been subjected to the seemingly endless chaos of well documented racist, rapist, 34 time convicted criminal and remarkably, former President of the United States Donald Trump, the Republican Frankenstein monster birthed from the likes of Sarah Palin and the Tea Party, and who now leads what has emerged into a full fledged neo-Nazi, White supremacist regime where unimpeachable truths do not exist unless dictated in Orwellian fashion and a 900 plus page document entitled Project 2025 serves as a blueprint for what will be enacted should he win another Presidential term this November.
For myself, life has grown increasingly darker due to all that stands to be lost for myself, the people I love, the children I teach and for the citizens of this nation and world at large who happen to not be wealthy, White, evangelical male should this existential threat come to pass. The additional threats of political violence are mounting and have been so for several years, making me more fearful, especially as my school is located mere blocks away from our State Capitol building.
While the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris has inject an essential ray of light, hope and joy into these proceedings so blinding in intensity that it instills hope inside of me, I simultaneously feel unquestionable terror. For is the excitement, grit and grass roots voting enough to topple the rage and political cheating already underway? What happens if Kamala Harris does indeed pull out a victory, which will have its own glass ceilings to shatter? What happens if Trump loses again? What happens if he wins again?
Writer/Director Alex Garland's "Civil War" is an astounding feat, a horrific "What If?' scenario that meets us all within this moment when our very democracy sits upon the most precarious knife's edge where it feels like the smallest puff of wind can blow the country either this or that way and at its worst, into a landscape from which we cannot recover. At this time of writing, I have seen Garland's film twice and I have been legitimately stirred while also finding myself amazed with the superior artistry on display as he conceptualizes our destruction, a quality which makes his film stand superbly taller than existing as some sort of political statement but as a richly delivered multi-layered experience which does indeed force us to question how much have we been desensitized to our surroundings as brutal and unforgiving as it has become...as well as how it has always been.
Set in an undetermined future dystopia where the (unnamed) President of the United States (Nick Offerman), now in his third term, and his administration are attempting to fend off a rising national secessionist uprising as led by a combined armed resistance known as the "Western Forces (WF)" of Texas and California (?!) with possibly another secessionist movement from Florida thrown in for good measure.
After surviving a suicide bombing attack in New York City, emotionally deadened war photo journalist Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and her colleagues, Reuters journalist Joel (Wagner Moura), and Lee's mentor and veteran New York Times journalist Sammy (a warmly grave Stephen McKinley Henderson) plot to drive from NYC to Washington D.C. to potentially interview the President before the aforementioned secessionist forces descend and fully overthrow the government. Unexpectedly joining the trio, and much to Lee's chagrin, is Jessie Collin (Cailee Spaeny), an aspiring war photo journalist who cites Lee as her source of inspiration.
Their journey is by turns solemn and harrowing with dashes of hope, levity, compassion, grace and humane sacrifice as the drive takes them through a rapidly dilapidated United States inching closer than ever to full oblivion.
If "Civil War" is to be the final film directed by Alex Garland, who has announced that he intends to step away from filmmaking to focus solely upon writing, then his film is indeed a striking document to leave behind as is final directorial statement. While I do realize and understand how Garland's approach may have been frustrating for some critics and viewers as it takes a decidedly apolitical stance in a politically themed film of such urgent brutality, I actually found the reluctance to "pick a side," so to speak, was precisely what this film needed in order to allow us to have a certain nuance within the overall warning signs.
The film's bird's eye view of war and conflict during a period of national history where we are deeply embedded within divisive conflicts increasingly fueled by rampant disinformation and violent political rhetoric and actions around the country as our 2024 Presidential election looms larger and larger due to the closeness of its proximity.
We are existing in what feels to be a horrific hallucination, a life as if we have inexplicably slid into a deathly dark alternate timeline. That is the feeling Alex Garland evokes with precision, and "Civil War" gives us a cinematic experience that reflects the everyday madness back to ourselves but with visual amplifications that fully mirror our disbelief, confusion and nightmarish awe as we question upon a daily basis, "Did I really see what I just saw? Did I really hear what I just heard?" And every day, our answer is a shaken "Yes." Our very fabric of reality is being called into question as what was unfathomable is now commonplace, and after a time, it almost doesn't even matter how we arrived here. We are NOW here...and we have to keep riding the waves to figure out how to survive. That is the nature of Garland's vision and it is as disturbing as the real lives we are living, where we are further being challenged to understand that yes...it can happen here in the supposed land of the free and home of the brave..
Alex Garland's "Civil War" is a multi-layered experience that creates and amalgamation of the political thriller, road movie, and socio-political cultural critique. It is also a vibrant love letter to journalism and those who place themselves over and again into hellish, life threatening conditions to solely collect and report the stories for our benefits while additionally serving as a character study of a certain "adrenaline junkie" nature in these journalists that is akin to the character study we witnessed in Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" (2008). Returning to the road movie conceit, the film often transported me to Francis Ford Coppola's iconic masterpiece "Apocalypse Now" (1979), as our journalists' vignette styled travelogue towards the shadowy President references the odyssey up river to locate the mysterious Colonel Kurtz.
Yet, perhaps even most of all, Garland's film allows his characters, as well as all of us in the audience, profoundly serious self reflection regarding our relationship with violence, whether the very real events we see every day and night upon the news as well as within what we consume in our fiction based media with its swath of anti-heroes, serial killers, and fantastical acts of depravity and degradation, mayhem and madness.
Through the character of Lee Smith, we have one of our conduits and again, Kirsten Dunst surprised me with her depth of reach with her quietly blistering performance. Over the years as she phased from Sofia Coppola's "The Virgin Suicides" (1999) to her criminally misunderstood and beautifully layered work in Cameron Crowe's "Elizabethtown" (2005) to Lars von Trier's "Melancholia" (2011) and more, with "Civil War," I saw a performance of such unprecedented hardened gravity, so often with just her far reaching gaze and without ever saying a word.
Lee is the embodiment of desensitization, spending her adult life chasing the story and the image while enduring unspeakable events of violence. Only her sense of journalistic duty and the camera lens separates her from the barrage of carnage--or does it? "Civil War" charts her inner journey from desensitization towards a certain reclamation of her humanity as we witness her tenuous relationship with Jessie, which begins with a guarded callousness towards one of genuine friendship and even a hint of Motherly protection with rubs against Jessie's comparative innocence, youthful recklessness, hero worship (and possibly some inferred sexual attraction).
To that end, Jessie represents who Lee once was and the older Sammy represents what Lee could possibly still be as Sammy's own adrenaline junkie nature and intense pursuit of the journalistic truth has not dulled his humanistic empathy which he continuously offers up as a sage. Even further, is Jessie's journey from innocence towards desensitization making the film function as a riveting and tragic dual narrative/character study of working professionals trying to retain a sense of justice, integrity, duty, morality and sanity in an insane world.
Always the camera is the truth teller and the barrier, for where are the humane lines drawn with what is visually captured, and how it is disseminated to the masses? Is every moment in life and death demanding to be documented--again, a commentary upon our social media culture as well our consumption of violence through the media.
One of the most striking sequences in the film is a gunfight and political executions scored to De La Soul's "Say No Go," a wholly jarring merging of sound and images. This particular montage sequence threw me off initially but then, it just clicked...and brilliantly so. For what Garland accomplished was a sly commentary upon a most overused set piece in films and television: the violent action sequence set to a pop song. What better way to be desensitized than have something to tap our feet to as people are being blown away.
In "Civil War," Alex Garland's impeccable visual style matches and enhances the grim subject matter, again showcasing how the camera itself provides both clarity and distance towards the images the photographer, and in this case, the filmmaker, is chronicling. The quality of the film visually is glistening! Garland, working alongside Cinematographer Rob Hardy, ensure that every moment in "Civil War" is presented with a crystal sharpness, making the film--frame by frame--look like the types of photography enshrined in the pages of LIFE magazine or National Geographic.
This tactic is present even in sequences of grisly, graphic violence, which I assure you is never gratuitous but realized again just as if these motion picture images could simultaneously serve as the actual photographs Lee and Jessie are taking as well as the ones we are accustomed to viewing in real life. And throughout everything, Garland is challenging his characters and us to question at which point do these acts of inhumanity cease to just exist as images we can be detached from and affect us as the reality that has been captured, especially when the loss of life is caught on film.
"Civil War" concludes with a bravura 25 minute sequence (again juxtaposing cinematic trills with approximations of real world political destruction) depicting the Western Forces' assault upon Washington D.C. and into the White House itself, ending with a devastating final shot (pun intended) and it's an absolutely killer image and has haunted me ever since having seen the film. And what a stunning achievement even that moment is for within this fabricated image, Alex Garland forces us so uncomfortably into the "What If?" nature of his film that we cannot help but to think of our current reality and ponder just what would become of us should this happen for real.
The camera is the key to the truth, about the world as well as ourselves. While I do not see myself as a photographer, I adore taking pictures and scratching my filmmaker's itch by seeing if I can capture images in an artful way. I remember in 2011, during the lengthy protests at the State Capitol building against former Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker, which I attended week after week and at which I took hundreds of photos. I would capture as much as I possibly could and return home to annotate every shot and then upload them to my Facebook page for my online community of family and friends to catch wind of what was happening here and what the main news media would either feature or choose to ignore. I fantasized myself as being some sort of war correspondent, feverishly placing myself right at the epicenter of one moment after another to get the story and once the protests faded away eventually, I found myself having great difficulty readjusting myself to the relative silence I existed within before the protests began.
In my own miniscule way, I think I may have captured a taste of what real photo journalists might experience in their careers, which they enter willingly and repeatedly for the purpose of getting the story. I cannot begin to fathom what psychological, emotional toll and damage it must take upon them to tell our collective human story. Alex Garland's "Civil War" is a sobering tribute to those figures while serving as an essential warning and lament for all that we are bound to lose should we continue hurtling towards our own extinction by our own hands.
Alex Garland's "Civil War" is one of 2024's very best films.
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