It Could Happen Here

Alex Garland’s war epic turns the lens on American numbness to conflict.

americans love to see their institutions destroyed onscreen. Since Independence Day had aliens blow up the White House, it has been standard practice for blockbusters to defile an iconic government building. (After a brief recess following 9/11, we went right back to it once the cultural all clear sounded.) Maybe because our institutions had been deemed secure and unchanging for so long, the idea that they might be ravaged by aliens, meteors, or zombies became a naughty fantasy. A variation on this kind of chaos has become all too real lately with more than 40 percent of the country opining in a recent poll that a civil war is likely within the next decade. I’m not convinced that the constant barrage of apocalyptic destruction on our screens is unrelated. We’ve been spectators of the fantasy for so long that we’ve come to imagine we’re participants in it.

Here’s another truth about repeatedly indulging in our fantasies: We become desensitized to them. What makes Alex Garland’s Civil War so diabolically clever is the way it both revels in and abhors our fascination with the idea of America as a battlefield. This time, the spectacle is more coy yet all consuming; what’s being incinerated in Civil War is the American idea itself. The film is set in a version of the present in which strongman tactics and secessionist movements have fractured the U.S. into multiple armed, politically unspecified factions. The president (Nick Offerman) is serving his third term; he has dissolved the FBI, bombed American cities,

and made a point of killing journalists on sight, or so we’re told. California and Texas have teamed up as something called the Western Forces. There’s also the “Florida Alliance.” Smoke rises from cities; highways are filled with walls of wrecked cars; a suicide bomber dives into a crowd lined up for water rations; and death squads, snipers, and mass graves dot the countryside.

How we got here, or what these people are fighting over, is largely meaningless to Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and Joel (Wagner Moura), two war journalists making the treacherous drive from New York to Washington, D.C., to try to secure an exclusive, probably dangerous interview with the president. Tagging along in their van are Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a young photographer who aspires to a career like Lee’s, and Sammy (Stephen Mckinley Henderson), an aging reporter who wants to go to the front lines in Charlottesville. Mostly numb to the horrors they’re chronicling, the journalists gather in hotel bars, get drunk, and loudly yuk it up with the jacked bonhomie we recognize from movies set in foreign lands like The Killing Fields or Salvador. After Jessie’s run-in with a man who threatens to shoot tortured captives, Lee tells her it’s not their job to get involved: “We record so others can ask these questions.”

One reason Lee is a legend in her field is that she has grown a defensive shell around herself. She wants to get the picture. That’s it. She’s protective of Jessie but only so the girl won’t slow them down. “Would you photograph that moment if I got shot?” Jessie asks. “What do you think?” Lee responds, as if the answer were obviously “yes.” We also understand that Lee bears psychological scars. At night, alone in her hotel, she revisits the horrors she has photographed all over the world. “I thought I was sending a warning home: ‘Don’t do this,’” she says of her earlier work. “But here we are.” Garland can be clunky with dialogue, but Dunst makes just about any line sound true. Her face tells one story, her words another; together, they bring this conflicted woman to life.

The film takes on Lee’s traumatized numbness to a degree. Garland knows how to build suspense, and while he depicts astonishing violence with the requisite horror, he moves his film along in provocative ways. After one ghastly sequence in which guerrillas shoot a weeping soldier, the director cuts to a montage set to De La Soul’s “Say No Go,” adding a peppy beat to the grisly images. Even the film’s episodic quality—it’s ultimately a harrowing travelogue through the war-torn Eastern Seaboard—feels like a provocation. Part of shutting yourself off to such horrors involves being able to move past them, and Civil War, like its characters, glides through each monstrous vignette with unbothered brio. This can make the film feel weirdly weightless. Its characters are observers and nomads, increasingly less invested in what they’re witnessing.

Civil War’s lack of a political point of view, as well as its refusal to identify the positions of its warring parties, has come in for some understandable criticism. But does any sane person want a version of this film that attempts to spell out these people’s politics or, even worse, takes sides in its conflict? Garland does include flashes of real news footage from recent American disturbances, but he has clearly done more research into media depictions of foreign war zones.

This is maybe why the film’s vagueness around political context feels more pointed than spineless: The conceit is to depict Americans acting as we’ve seen people act in international conflicts. In that sense, Civil War winds up becoming a movie about itself. Beyond the plausibility of war in the U.S., it’s about the way we refuse to let images from wars like this get to us. It doesn’t want to make us feel so much. It wants us to ask why we don’t feel anything. ■