Civil War review: Morbid spectacle destined for debate

Civil War is an intriguing spectacle; a skin-tremoring thrill ride that turns a blind eye to politics as it prowls around a nation’s poisoned psyche. 

Alex Garland’s Apocalypse Now Now is designed to be divisive. After all, it revolves around a contextless conflict between bafflingly allied states, Texas and California, and opens on scenes of increasingly familiar bloodshed and unrest as Nick Offerman’s Bush/Clinton-styled president claims the American government is closer than ever to “the greatest victory in the history of mankind” (a Trumpian declaration if I’ve heard one).

But those seeking political polemic on one wing or the other will be disappointed and (probably) neurotically irate — but they’re searching for something that intentionally isn’t there. 28 Days Later wasn’t really about zombies, nor was Ex Machina about the dangers of AI; Civil War isn’t interested in affirming or attacking your views, but lamenting it for not doing so is a willful misread of the film.

Instead, the movie’s interests are three-fold: the ease with which tribalism can and does take hold today (“Someone’s trying to kill us, we’re trying to kill them,” a random soldier says out in the sticks); the limits of objectivity in war journalism; and shock and awe.

Civil War deals in casual atrocities

Lee (Kirsten Dunst) is a battle-hardened photojournalist; she’s seen things you couldn’t unsee, like a man being set alight right in front of her — and her first reaction, no matter how bleak, is to pick up the camera. The movie opens in New York, with Lee snapping a rowdy protest. She meets Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a wide-eyed photographer who wants to see it all as fast as possible. Things go haywire in startling, stomach-churning fashion.

Joel (Wagner Moura), Lee’s colleague, has a plan: he wants to get an interview with the president before the war’s over (or worse — or better, depending on where you are — he’s killed). Jessie charms her way into the treacherous journey to Washington DC, much to the ire of Lee, alongside Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), an old-school journo desperate to keep his skin in the game.

While that’s about as much as you should know going in, the plot is essentially just a long, winding road of suspense-ridden set pieces and provocations; bodies hanging from motorway bridges, choppers downed in car parks, snipers looming above seemingly peaceful small-town life. These sights feel antithetical to the life either side would want for their people, but these horrors are only unimaginable on home soil; that’s its underlying power: normalizing casual atrocities usually reserved for faraway, easy-to-ignore warfare.

But blimey, as horrific as it is, the film is constantly electrifying and frequently gorgeous, whether it’s a White House-surrounding firefight that makes January 6 look timid, a haunting drive through flaming trees, or distant nighttime horizons warmed by the amber glow of fire and bullets shooting across the sky à la Come and See; not stars, not even dreams, but nightmares waiting to find a victim. Garland is operating on a larger visual scale here than ever before, enabled by Rob Hardy’s versatile cinematography, with armchair-gripping, practical action sequences and inescapably immersive chaos.

Civil War is a scary ode to journalism

It’s one of Dunst’s most singular performances; raw, drained, and commandingly portrayed. Spaeny is incredibly charming, as is Henderson, with Moura providing sturdy macho charisma. But even in Dunst’s case, the movie isn’t as interested in the characters compared to what they represent: the fearless need to tell a story, no matter the cost to themselves or those around them, regardless of how much blood is spilled. “We record so other people ask,” Lee explains. It does raise troubling, complex questions about journalistic objectivity; how dispassionate does one need to be to see the snap-worthy allure of death?

“Would you photograph me if I got shot?” Jessie asks Kirsten Dunst’s Lee. “What do you think?” She coldly responds. Therein lies the point; amazingly, this would make a brilliant double-feature with The Fablemans.

But there’s more to Garland’s script, even in lieu of a political edge. It’s summed up perfectly in what’ll surely rank as one of the tensest, scariest scenes of 2024: Jesse Plemons’ rifle-toting ‘soldier’ stops the group and demands to know “what kind of Americans” they are. We don’t need to know his rationale, because there is none; both to us and a concerning subset of the film’s US, this is a war without reason, and even if there was one, everyone seems to have forgotten it. The whole thing has become little more than an excuse to choose between one army and another, with lives so empty their mere existence is suddenly just cause for a call to arms; and there’s no time for nuance when someone’s holding a gun.

Civil War review: 4/5

Civil War’s not-too-distant dystopia will be too opaque for some, but this is powerful, pulse-pounding, challenging filmmaking that boldly resists partisanship; in a movie that hates taking sides, why should we feel the need to pick one?

Civil War will hit cinemas on April 12, 2024. You can also find out what other new movies you should be streaming this month.