Civil War
Shoot pictures first, ask questions later.
Writer/director Alex Garland is no stranger to controversy. He asks difficult questions through the medium of speculative fiction: Annihilation is about the human death drive; Sunshine and 28 Days Later (both of which Danny Boyle directed) are about religious and humanist responses to mortality, respectively; Ex Machina and Men are about gender’s place in society. His newest, Civil War, asks a series of vexing questions about journalistic neutrality and integrity as it follows war journalists making their way across what used to be the United States. The states still technically remain—the group passes from New York to Pennsylvania to West Virginia—but the federal and social glue holding the country together was set on fire long ago, consumed in the blaze of the titular war.
Audiences looking for answers about why this war began in the first place are going to be disappointed. Garland’s script holds the reasons for the action at a maddening remove; when Joel (Wagner Moura) asks a sniper who he’s fighting for, the sniper replies with disdain, peering down the scope of his rifle at an enemy combatant: “He’s trying to kill us. We’re trying to kill him.” Any history that has gotten the once-United States to this point has been elided. The lore doesn’t matter. What matters is that there is increasingly splintered fighting in the streets and that—no matter how exceptional American might think their country is—it could (and did) happen here.
Garland spends precious time emphasizing the idea that the United States is not immune to war within its own borders, mostly in the form of a road trip by reporter Joel and his colleagues Lee (Kirsten Dunst), a veteran photojournalist, and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), as well as a young amateur war photographer they’ve picked up named Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). Establishing shots trace the press car’s route through the foothills of Appalachia and into the shells of bombed-out towns, lingering on abandoned cars and broken helicopters juxtaposed against perfectly ordinary strip malls and gas stations. The film’s most harrowing sequences are calculated for the deepest impact through their setting: an early scene showing two bloodied, near-dead prisoners strung up in a car wash; a later confrontation with a hostile soldier (Jesse Plemons) in the middle of a sun-drenched field. The framing is matter-of-fact, laying everything in the open. Lee has seen it all before, and she’s numb to it, snapping pictures with the same dead-eyed resolve of the more seasoned fighters she encounters. She’s weary, and she doesn’t know how to do anything else. “I thought I was sending a warning home,” she says of her career covering other wars overseas. She’d wanted to prevent the same kind of fighting from erupting in her own country, but the warning has gone unheeded, and the war rages on.
The problem with Lee’s past work—her failed warning—is the same problem burning at the heart of the movie itself: the dilemmas of journalistic remove and artistic intent. Lee faces an existential crisis every time she closes her eyes and every time she snaps a picture. Dunst displays that weariness in the hooded expression on her face. What good is it to be skilled at taking pictures of atrocities if the images do nothing to change people’s minds? Lee’s profession is an inherent contradiction. She takes her pictures, but she claims her vantage point is one of studied neutrality. “We record so other people ask. That’s the job,” she tells the young photographer Jessie, a novice who wants to do what Lee does. But a warning can’t mean much if it isn’t stated plainly. Lee’s pictures show the atrocity divorced from context, which boils her message down to the idea that war is hell without bothering to explain how the fighters got into their situation, nor what they could have done to stop it. Likewise, Civil War follows its core group of journalists as they embed with different groups of combatants, and we never know which side they’re talking to. The film plays coy about where its own sympathies lie.
Garland’s own artistic remove is the point. It’s frustrating not knowing much about how this conflict came to be, about not being certain about whom to trust, who is good, who won’t commit a war crime. The terms of the argument are unclear. When conflict is leached of all ideology, when there’s no reason given to fight, then it all seems pointless, an ugly game where no sides come out on top, even if there’s a clear winner.
The same can be said of perfectly neutral journalism. When two sides in a conflict are made equivalent, presented from a seat of impartiality that is not grounded in truth or moral consequences, then there can be no clear judgment about right or wrong. What’s left, from a journalistic standpoint, is the action of chasing a scoop, the adrenaline rush of embedding with a group of combatants, the thrill of making it out alive on the other side, all without the stakes of fighting for one’s own convictions and beliefs. Civil War presents its journalists from the same neutral remove: a warning about the future from an impossibly blank standpoint. As with Lee’s photography, the medium is the message. Garland is willing to ask the contradictory question about whether the pursuit of the story is worth it. The question is worth asking and worth lingering over; I’m glad he made the attempt. But a non-answer does no one any good; reporting from perfect neutrality means working from an impossible position. If Garland—and his characters—had committed to an ideology, then the fight might have been worth seeing through. As it is, the film is ugly questions all the way down.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★★★☆
Civil War is in theaters now.