'Civil War,' the in-your-face chiller destined to be one of the most provocative films in recent memory, dares you not to give a damn.
Its lead character, a seasoned war photographer, reflects on a career of capturing war trauma in harm’s way: “Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning back home: don’t do this.” But as she looks in her current predicament, taking photos of Americans killing Americans. “But here we are.”
Indeed, her homeland has now become a war zone. No, it’s not the first civil war in American history; but it’s still an unthinkable outcome.
I hesitate to say that "Civil War," written and directed by Alex Garland ("28 Days Later," "Ex Machina"), takes place in a dystopian America, because that may conjure up some other movies that considered a dystopian society — think "The Purge" or "The Road" — while Civil War is much more recognizable. Simply put, that means not every inch of "Civil War’s" landscape is a barren wasteland. In fact, because there are many parts of "Civil War’s" America that have dodged mortar shells, it's that more believable. For example, there’s a mid-movie scene where a group of journalists, desperate to make their way to the war’s front line (in this case, it’s D.C.), stop in a mid-American small shop. The store’s clerk, with an ear-to-ear grin, acts as if everything is just peachy.
“Don’t you think it’s strange that a pretty huge civil war is going on outside?” asks one of the journalists.
“We just try to stay out of that,” says the still-smiling clerk. “From what we see on the news, that’s probably the best thing to do.”
To be sure, this is not your great-great-grandfather’s civil war. This is a fully militarized conflict. A total of 19 states have seceded from the U.S. (and those states appear to have as much military hardware as the D.C.-based forces). The fact that California and Texas are among those that have joined the opposition may have you think that, in today’s political climate, those states are polar opposites. But I happen to think there’s genius in Garland's positioning of Texas and California as allies. "Civil War" is not a 2024 guessing game. It’s about a three-term president (Nick Offerman) becoming such a despot that dangerous alliances can emerge from almost anywhere. And because the reasons for the civil war are entirely left for interpretation, in many ways, Garland’s film is a Rorschach test of America, left for us to wrestle with on our own. Yet, no matter the reasons, the conflict itself, the film’s vast scope as the war sprawls and spreads across the states, feels startlingly real. This is no dystopia; it's a visceral, bracing depiction of what a 21st century American civil war would actually look and sound like, from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans, white with foam. Despite its intentionally unspecified origin story, this film’s civil war might be traced to a lost thread around the very idea of America — the disintegration of a nation once bound by common history and a shared set of principles.
“What kind of American are you?” asks an unnamed soldier, terrifyingly portrayed by Jesse Plemmons, in arguably the film’s most memorable and distressing scene. It’s a question that confronts our most divisive instincts, but it’s also one that everyone, on both sides of the war, is at a loss to answer. Instead, in this war, and in the arc that damned the country to it, there is only us and them. The electric, heart-pounding tension that surges throughout the film is its own clear-eyed, sometimes raw observation of how it manifests in violent conflict.
Within hours of "Civil War’s" premiere when it jumped off the screen at this year’s South by Southwest Film Festival, the internet blew up with first reactions: “Scary as Hell,” wrote one critic. “It’s unlike anything I’ve ever watched,” wrote another. “Epic and deeply intimate,” wrote a third.
No, it’s not likely to be the best movie of 2024. But it will be in a tight race for being the year’s most compelling.
