Review of the Civil War film: A cowardly look from nowhere

IIf we could even find a single reason why the United States has screwed up over the last few decades – and I realize it's a bit difficult to find just a single reason – then it might be the “philosophy” that has had a grip on what has happened for far too long in journalism: the idea of ​​false balance, that there are two sides to every story and that both sides are equally valid, even in cases where this is not even remotely plausible.

Just one example: “Centuries of industrial civilization pumping massive amounts of carbon into the air are heating the planet to dangerous levels,” says a representative of the vast majority of climate scientists, whereas “LOL, no, it's not,” says one of the few scientists who works as a paid henchman for a fossil fuel company. That's not honest. This is not surveillance journalism. This is a benefit of corporate influence. This is a recipe for a planetary suicide pact.

This is the milieu in which writer-director Alex Garland (Men, Ex Machina) spineless dystopian action drama Civil War totally enjoys sitting. Here the United States is caught in a murderous conflict, the details of which we as an audience are not informed about. We get brief insights into a speech by the American President (Nick Offerman: The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, Bad Times at the El Royale), while railing against the insurgent “Western forces” of *check notes* *checks* Texas and California, two states that almost anyone concerned with the current tinderbox situation in the real US would reasonably assume that they stand on opposite sides of a profound social divide in America. We hear nothing from Western forces, certainly nothing that would make us understand why two states with such different cultures would join forces or even why they rebelled. The lack of context for anything and everything that happens here feels like utter cowardice on Garland's part, a failure of the ruinous both-side-ism that dictates that every perspective must be equally valuable. Why is America at war with itself? Probably good reasons on all sides? Nonsense.

But it gets worse. Civil War It's not about the conflict, but about the reporters who report on it: photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst: The seduced, hidden figures) and her professional partner Joel (Wagner Moura: Elysium, woman at the helm) and her companion, newcomer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny: Based on Sex, Pacific Rim: Uprising) and veteran Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson: Dune, Lady Bird). They've heard rumors of an impending attack on Washington DC by Western forces – expected to reach the capital on July 4th *rolls eyes* – and so they'll remember the battle they just covered in New York , head to City hoping to reach DC in time to get some good photos.

Garland thinks he's speaking up for journalists here, and to some extent he is: the cast is beyond great, but they deserve a far braver and more insightful film than this. Spaeny, her brave and sparkling Jessie, who is about to learn hard lessons that will shake her out of her naivety, is physically unrecognizable since her turn as the very young Mrs. Elvis Presley last year Priscilla but psychologically similar in how she nicely balances the enthusiasm of a teenager with the terrible realities she will encounter. Dunst carries the heavy burden of a war photographer's experience with a weary kind of horror; Her Lee explicitly states that she never actually imagined that the nightmares she captured abroad would be repeated at home.

But Lee and Jessie and Joel and Sammy exist in a larger context that they understand and that we lack. They know – because of course they do, because they live in this world – what the different sides of this conflict stand for. (The US appears to be divided into more than just two factions, but it's hard to tell.) Denying that context to those of us digesting their stories is not only unfair to us, but unfair to the characters: We cannot make any decision about what kind of journalism they are trying to do. Are they aiming for an impossible “view from nowhere,” that false objectivity of modern reportage that is so damaging? Or do they intend to do something more meaningful for their work? Garland's own out-of-nowhere perspective is a major disservice to his characters.

There's some power in there Civil War, especially visual: one image that has stuck with me is that of a crashed military helicopter in a shopping center parking lot, a powerful rupture of loose American capitalism and the relative calm and stability that enables it. There's also value in pushing back against U.S. cultural complacency: depictions of the kind of civil unrest and outright urban warfare we're all too used to seeing in the news, taking place in other, far-flung places and often with the US government complicity should be a wake-up call alerting us to the very dangerous situation the US currently finds itself in.

But instead, Garland has given us something dangerously irresponsible: a film with Hollywood gloss – “witness it in IMAX” – at an incredibly precarious time for the United States, when small-scale uprisings have already occurred and a larger conflict is not impossible appears. Civil War has nothing interesting or new to say about the journalism at its heart, and with its claim to “objectivity” it lacks any meaningful focus. I'm really angry about this Civil War in a way that few films have ever made me.

more films like this:
• A private war [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | BFI Player UK]
•Bushwick [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK]