‘Civil War’ Review
The first great film of 2024.
THE THING THAT CIVIL WAR CAPTURES about sectarian conflict is that it is not typically a coherent ideological struggle, one forcing the final result of arguments unheeded. Rather, it is a function of survival—he’s shooting at me, so I’m shooting at him—and inchoate score settling.
Anyone who has been to a theater in the last year has seen a trailer for this movie with the “What kind of American?” scene, in which a gunman played by Jesse Plemons asks a group of journalists if they can describe the kind of American they are. Bad news for the stringer from Hong Kong; better news for the girls from Missourah and Colaradah. Whether you consider this sequence self-parody or chilling depends a bit on your perspective coming in.
More telling is a moment much earlier in the picture. Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), an inexperienced photographer, has hitched a ride with renowned photojournalist Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and writer Joel (Wagner Moura). They stop for gas somewhere outside of Pittsburgh, traveling south from New York; as the group refuels, Jessie says she wants to check something out, and one of the gunmen guarding the gas station follows her. Lee, worried for her young ward, follows the pair as they walk down toward a car wash out back. As the camera approaches, we see what drew Jessie’s eye: two men, hung from the wrists inside the car wash, dangling between the big round brushes.
At first you think—hope?—they’re just bodies, long dead, waiting for burial. But one coughs and the other moans and you realize this man accompanying Jessie is, what, watching them? Keeping guard? Torturing them? They’re looters. So he says. But their real crime? “I went to high school with him,” the guy says, pointing to one of the bloodied victims. “He didn’t talk to me much.”
As good a reason as any to string a man up.
ALEX GARLAND, THE WRITER AND DIRECTOR of Civil War (as well as Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Men), has positioned the film as aggressively nonpartisan in the standard American sense: the president (Nick Offerman) is a would-be tyrant who has stuck around for a third term and earned the wrath of a weird cross section of American states as a result. That nothing here, from the alliances of the states to the ideological tenor of the combatants, maps onto current partisan splits is very much the point. Because the point is to watch what happens, to record the insanity.
I’ve seen people describe Civil War as a love letter to journalism, but that isn’t quite right either: Joel is an adrenaline junkie talking about how the sight of tracer rounds in the distance make him hard; we see hotels full of journalists celebrating in New York City, doing shots after watching a suicide bombing. Gallows humor is one thing, but this is something else. Something . . . grotesque.
Still, it is a movie about journalism, and while it occasionally veers into the absurd—there are moments during the final assault on Washington, D.C., where the photographers and the writers and the videographers are presented as, essentially, parts of the military units conducting the raids on Nick Offerman’s White House compound—Garland captures something real about the finality of wartime photography. The bodies being dragged off the street, the tired faces of the soldiers clearing corners, the rictus grins of the guys on mounted .50 cals executing enemies. “We record so other people can ask,” Smith says at one point.
Civil War is a travelogue, and we’re just along for the ride; one of the film’s strengths is that we aren’t treated to a serious ideological discursion, that no one tries to tell us who in this conflict is right and who is wrong. We learn enough from what we see to know that this sort of warfare is horrifying and that’s enough. And it’s incredibly propulsive: I never once glanced at my watch wondering how much time was left. The action, when it occurs, is tense and loud, as loud as I can remember a movie being in the theater since I saw Heat at the AFI Silver sometime in the late-’00s. The gunplay is dynamic, but doesn’t overstay its welcome. It helps that Garland is efficient, bringing the picture in at 107 minutes.
It further helps that Dunst delivers career-best work as Smith. She is tired, anxious, angry, and scared, sometimes separately, sometimes all at once. And she is both mother and teacher to Jessie—and while their twin fates are perhaps too neatly wrapped up, it all makes sense in the context of the film.
Those seeking a statement about our times from Civil War beyond a blanket suggestion that Americans would be insane to engage in a second will likely be disappointed. But folks in search of a gripping mid-budget action movie posing an interesting question will be thrilled. It’s the first really intriguing movie I’ve seen this year.