Civil War (2024)

Score: 5 / 5

Movies like this rarely come along. They also rarely measure up to their potential. But Alex Garland does some of the most clever, interesting, and provocative filmmaking yet of his career here, which is saying a hell of a lot (considering his directorial filmography of Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Men). 

Whatever you think Civil War is going to be, you're wrong. Its title and any brief synopsis might lead you to expect a cautionary tale about contemporary social anxieties in the US. Many professional reviews laud Garland's technique and vision but decry what they see as vapid, pointless violence without real political or historical grounding or consequence, a safe bet to avoid upsetting any real-life factions. Several friends I know who have seen it thoroughly enjoyed it as a summer blockbuster-type action war flick with a little too much drama and pretense. But all these descriptions are horribly reductive, leading audiences into specific, limiting perspectives on the film without encouraging the kind of free curiosity the film explicitly lionizes.

It's not like anything Garland -- hell, anyone -- has made before. Endlessly convincing, haunting and disturbing in equal measure, the film constantly feels like something we shouldn't be witnessing. Despite Garland's clear love of other films and stories that clearly influenced this project, perhaps most notably Apocalypse Now and The Year of Living Dangerously (though Salvador and A Private War came to my mind; a friend referenced Under Fire and Welcome to Sarajevo, which I've not seen), here he carves out his own niche by having us follow Western journalists covering the collapse of a country. The difference is that, this time, it's our country.

Set in the not very distant future, one perhaps approaching us sooner than we would like, we're first introduced to the US President (Nick Offerman) announcing that the country's civil war is near an end. We're not told, ever, the exact origin or nature of this strife. We're not told, yet, that this is the president's third term in office, though hints are dropped later about his authoritarian rule in what has become a dystopian nation. Exact politics are intentionally blurry and counter-intuitive: there are no red/blue divides in the way we understand them, but rather multiple factions at play. A New People's Army controls the Pacific Northwest and northern Plains, and the Florida Alliance apparently recently failed, while the main players we follow are the Loyalists (presumably what is left of the "united" states) and the Western Forces (of California and Texas by name). And, in fact, though the president claims victory is nigh, we're given lots of reasons to doubt that.

Intentionally -- and effectively -- vague politics aside, even the nature and exact geography of this war are unclear. A brief shot of the contiguous map, color coded for its factions, does little to help. This isn't a hyperrealistic prophecy about the fall of America, and it's not meant to be. This is a hypothesis, a thought experiment of what American values are and why we never seem able to agree on things. Garland's tight-wire act between what could be thickly politicized melodrama and propaganda (in an election year, no less) manifests as an arthouse film about everything wrong with US culture even as it deliberately sidesteps our specifics. It's an enormous gamble both narratively and stylistically, but Garland and his team pull it off in his biggest film yet as well as what will be known as one of the best films of the year.

Its most novel aspect is its characters, the small group of reporters with whom we enter and exit the world of the film. The journalists -- specifically photographers, whose work is nonverbal and slightly more defensible against accusations of bias or "fake news" -- aren't interested in explaining the conflict or searching for meaning in it. They do, however, want the first scoop, and it's not always clear why; they don't seem to have much editorial oversight or quota to meet, so perhaps they simply want to convey images from the battlefield to the public as quickly and transparently as possible. They have apparently no concern for the politics of what's happening, and as they embark on a tour of the battlefront, their values take shape as something far more meaningful than what the soldiers around them are fighting for.

I won't recap the plot in detail here. Nor will I summarize the characters (the actors are, uniformly, excellent, especially Kirsten Dunst and Wagner Moura). They assemble somewhat haphazardly in Brooklyn at a horrific scene before deciding to go to Washington, D.C., to interview the president before the rebels assault the city. Needing to follow the battlefront leads them in a wide circle to the south -- Charlottesville, in fact, which is noteworthy -- and the horrors they witness, endure, and escape en route make up the story. Much like the characters, we're forced to see the unthinkable and decide what to do with it, either to weep or avert our eyes, either to sit with the impact or compartmentalize it to keep going. The film is a test of endurance that I'm not sure it's possible to experience entirely unscathed.

Hot-topic items extend beyond the dropping of key red/blue locations that aren't as obvious as they might seem (consider the film's California/Texas alliance, even as California becomes more libertarian in real life). The president is referred to as a fascist, but that label is less politically distinctive than it used to be. Questions of race abound, not only because Stephen McKinley Henderson plays one of the characters. Soldiers of indeterminate allegiance are clueless on the battlefront, sometimes just shooting because someone a mile away has a gun, explicitly aware that there is no leadership or oversight for their own private battles. Some soldiers, like Jesse Plemons in rosy red sunglasses, grill them for what "kind" of Americans their group of two white women and four people of color really are without any indication of what "kind" of American he is. Others let the journalists tag along without question or reserve as they storm the White House in the film's thrilling climax.

And while some audiences may resent not being told more via thick exposition and heavier world-building, I appreciate the vagaries and deliberate ambivalence baked into Civil War. The characters know where they are and what's happening -- more or less -- so they don't constantly talk about it to let us in. Because that's not what real people in their shoes would do. This holds true right through the film's ending, which features a moment of revelation that shook me to the core in a manner not unlike that in Nightcrawler. I can hardly wait to see this film again, but I'll need some comfort food to go with it.