What I saw at the movie `Civil War'

“Civil War,” the British writerdirector Alex Garland's box-office hit and critical Rorschach test, has generated not only a lot of revenue for its producers but a lot of interesting conversation about what his movie means, what is its political message, how relevant it is to our current crisis and what its appeal is for consumers of entertainment. “Overall, I'd say this film is about checks and balances,” Garland told The New York Times: “polarization, division, the way populist politics leads toward extremism, where extremism will end up and where the press is in all of that.”

The narrative is structured on a road trip, taken by four journalists in a press van, from New York City, where the streets are a bloody battlefield, to Washington, D.C., where a politically ambiguous authoritarian president is making a last stand against the encroaching “Western Forces,” led by an unlikely alliance of Texas and California (Garland's deliberate mashup). The reporters are sympathetic heroes in their scrupulous neutrality amid the chaotic violence they witness, in their ethos of not choosing sides but telling the story straight, and more to the point, getting the pictures — however ghastly, gruesome and horrifying they may be. They are Garland's avatars, his standins, his role models for what he's trying to do.

The demographics of the protagonists — and of all the characters we see — are admirably diverse, each likable yet complicated in their own way: the old Black veteran New York Times reporter; the ambitious yet inexperienced young female photographer who has talked her way into the trip; the ambiguously foreign-accented male driver/reporter with ambiguous designs on the young photographer; and the star of the car and on the screen, Kirsten Dunst playing a war-toughened photojournalist modeled on Lee Miller of World War II legend. They are a congenial crew to hang with as they drive into the hellscape of a vividly imagined, gorgeously photographed, alternately grisly and ghostly nation that has lost its mind and collapsed into barbaric conflict where nobody seems to know who they're shooting at or who exactly is the enemy or who's shooting at them or why.

It is indeed a gripping thriller, with a lively sound track of popular music too recent for me to recognize, with a visual lyricism that in places is breathtaking, with scenes of equally breathtaking brutality, and in the peaceful interludes when the protagonists are between battles and just talking and revealing themselves to each other, it executes the elements of storytelling and cinema with impressive artistry and troubling gravity. Is this what's really in store if things keep going the way they are?

The problem I have with “Civil War” is that, in depicting the apocalyptic carnage of what it warns against, it uses the same gory, bloody, nerverattling, sickening imagery that has become ever more graphic and hideously sensational with the help of digital and other special effects in all the other crappy, loud, cartoonish, futuristic or prehistoric fantasies whose insufferable trailers you have to sit through before the feature you came to see. In this case the movie features explicit violence and shocking images as a cautionary warning, yet at the same time it luxuriates in that violence as esthetically compelling entertainment and box-office gold.

In recent years I've been avoiding violent movies in favor of old-school adult dramas with complex characters sorting out the problems of being human. Political stories can be interesting, too, if they're not just propaganda for one cause or another. But there is no political content in “Civil War.” It is a movie that traffics in gratuitous mayhem to make its point — whatever that may be — which presents the dramatic irony and ethical paradox of a skilled, intelligent filmmaker evidently unable to engage in critical selfawareness. His picture exploits, in the name of “checks and balances,” the most extreme and sensational conventions of the medium. And that, amid so much creative accomplishment, reveals a failure of imagination.