Programme Notes: Civil War

‘Every time I survived a war zone I thought I was sending a warning home: Don’t do this,’ says Kirsten Dunst’s weary photojournalist in Alex Garland’s Civil War. ‘But here we are.’ The ‘here’ in question is the United States of a not-so-distant future. California, Texas and Florida have seceded from the union and are engaged in a war against the federal government; the president has disbanded the FBI, launched airstrikes against American citizens and is currently holed up in the compound-like environs of the White House, unseen for 14 months; tanks rolling through the streets of Manhattan are no longer an uncommon sight; and terrorist attacks and suicide bombers are so prevalent, New York’s unfazed hotel concierges advise guests never to use the lifts in case the power goes out. To paraphrase WB Yeats’ The Second Coming: things have fallen apart; the centre has not held and anarchy has most definitely been loosed upon the world. 

Coming out in an American election year shaping up to be even more stressful, bizarre and potentially ruinous than either the Trump/Biden stand-off of 2020 or the Clinton/Trump showdown of 2016, Garland’s dystopian nightmare certainly has an undeniable ‘ripped from the headlines’ quality, inspiring debates aplenty about its status as a provocative warning shot — an attempt, perhaps, to do for the increasingly tarnished democracies of the western world what the TV movies The Day After (1983) and Threads (1984) did for the spectre of nuclear war in the 1980s. 

But this is also very much business as usual for Garland. The British novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-director has built a career out of tapping into societal anxieties — disease in 28 Days Later (2002), climate catastrophe in Sunshine (2007), cloning in Never Let Me Go (2010), AI in Ex Machina (2014), toxic masculinity in Men (2022) — making him one of cinema’s foremost future-shock prognosticators. In recent interviews, though, he’s also said Civil War will be his last film as a director. If so, it feels like an apt way to bow out. Thematically it’s a culmination of much of his previous work’s interest in our own hubristic tendency towards self-destruction, albeit this time shorn of some of the more fanciful sci-fi genre scaffolding used in the likes of Annihilation (2018) and his mini series Devs (2020). That Civil War doesn’t need such trappings is its own grim comment on where American society is right now. Revolving around a group of US journalists on a precarious road trip to Washington DC to cover the government’s imminent collapse, the desolate imagery and road-side atrocities they encounter may be (overly) familiar from the glut of zombie movies and TV shows that 28 Days Later helped inspire, but post January 6, post-Covid we no longer need the undead to function as a metaphor for the decline of western civilisation. 

That presents its own special challenge for Civil War. Garland first conceived the idea in 2018 and wrote it in 2020, but it’s impossible not to view the attack on the Capitol in January 2021 as a jumping-off point for its portrayal of an America torn apart by insurrectionary fervour. Go looking for political parallels, though, and you’ll be sorely disappointed. The president (played by Nick Offerman, reuniting with Garland after Devs) is too rehearsed to be a Trump proxy, too tyrannical to be Biden, and the secessionist armies marching against him are similarly non-specific. Known as the Western Forces, they're comprised of a blue state/red state alliance between California and Texas (with Florida soon to join them), and are so devoid of identifiable political affiliations they’re indistinguishable from the federal soldiers and vigilante groups encountered along the way.

But Civil War is also a film about journalistic exasperation and starts by dropping us into the action as if we’re tuning into a news report on a conflict that’s been running for so long explainers are no longer offered, just bleak images of the ongoing attrition, dutifully recorded, but lacking the power to change anything. The film’s sense of detachment reflects the professional mindset of its protagonists, especially Dunst’s Lee, a war photographer named for pioneering World War Two photojournalist Lee Miller (whose life story has been turned into a forthcoming biopic starring Kate Winslet), but whose own thousand-yard stare reflects a deadening of her senses necessary to get the job done. Like her fellow Reuters news agency stringer Joel (Wagner Moura) and their elderly mentor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), she’s borne witness to atrocities in combat zones around the globe, so the irony isn’t lost on her that they’re now covering a divisive conflict in their own backyard for the rest of the world to consume with the same indifference. Accordingly, Garland doesn’t film the full-throttle combat action like a typical war movie. Shot bodies collapse to the ground, they don’t fly back through the air, and his use of hand-held and steady-cam footage mimics not just the way news crews might move through a war zone but how a photographer instinctively looks for a definitive image to sum up the chaos. 

For all the film’s ennobling depictions of journalism, though, it’s frustrating that Garland’s reporters never do anything as mundane as take notes, record interviews or file stories. And yet his decision to cut up his action sequences by inserting the still photographs we see Lee and her idealistic protege Jessie taking (she’s played by Priscilla star — and Devs alumnus — Cailee Spaeny) is a smart way of re-sensitising us to the unfurling violence, even if the aesthetically pleasing quirk of having Jessie shoot on black-and-white film once again stretches credulity (where on earth does she get it?). But perhaps that’s being unduly nitpicky. Civil War is a conversation starter in a way that movies used to be. And while its opaqueness can sometimes be maddening, a late scene featuring a quietly menacing Jesse Plemons as a soldier a little too concerned with ‘what type of Americans’ Lee and her colleagues are is so unnerving it leaves us in little doubt about Garland’s true purpose.