Despite some limitations, movie coheres into determined warning
Much like America itself, writer-director Alex Garland’s “Civil War” is a precarious sort of success almost in spite of itself, and despite being its own worst storytelling enemy. Garland’s fourth feature sticks to a straightforward narrative path; it’s the tone and rhythm likely to carve up audiences into warring factions.
I found it coldly gripping, as well as a mite ham-fisted. At its best, this vision of American end times sets aside its less persuasive “tell” for more persuasive “show,” without generic spectacle or diversionary thrills. It’s stern, methodical and essentially serious.
A “Western Front” secessionist movement, with California and Texas leading the way, has sparked a second civil war. We hear a casual reference to an infamous “Antifa massacre;” elsewhere, in actual news camera footage, images grabbed from the 2017 Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and other domestic catastrophes diagnose a grievously ill body politic.
The story hitches a ride with a quartet of reporters and photographers fleeing New York to get to Washington D.C. Hard-bitten photojournalist Lee, a haunted veteran of various international war zones played with real steel by Kirsten Dunst, and fellow Reuters journalist Joel (Wagner Moura), have set their sights on interviewing the president (Nick Offerman) before the U.S. government officially falls.
We’re given scant howdid-we-get-here particulars, presumably because we can guess. This national leader is a three-term POTUS who, we hear, has summarily gotten rid of the FBI and routinely conducts airstrikes on an unruly populace. Lee, Joel, veteran reporter Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and newbie tagalong photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) travel south, aiming first for Charlottesville and the Western Front, where the combat’s especially hot. Lee hates having Jessie along for this risky excursion, though she’s talented and unbound by caution. Their push-pull relationship centers the human element of “Civil War.”
Garland has said in interviews that the only stance he wanted to take, overtly, was a pro-democratic free press stance, in tandem with an antiwar movie that actually believes itself. “Civil War” succumbs here and there to an audience-friendly elimination of an unsavory threat.
As they roll toward the D.C. climax, where the embedded journalists scramble around a bulletstrewn White House, the characters are reduced to pure survival mechanisms. Around the midpoint, Jesse Plemons enters the narrative as a white nationalist controlling his little corner of rural America. He’s on the hunt for anyone who’s not a “real”
American, and he has a lyme-dusted pit of corpses to prove it.
The scene works; it’s extremely tense, wellacted, brutally casual.
It’s also a little cheap. Garland can’t resist an easy comeuppance here, and in many ways, his movie is very blunt in what it sees, and shows us, in a nation embracing its worst instincts. “Civil War” keeps its characterizations lean, reductive, even, without the zingy thrills and warm hugs of “The Last of Us.” It’s a movie equivalent of a bracing dip in a lake dangerously near freezing.
But Garland the screenwriter lets down Garland the director this time, with solemn exchanges in need of a little variety. And yet I’m still wrestling with this movie, and recalling its images of department store malls turned to rubble, and worse. Limitations, problems, yes. But “Civil War” coheres into its own determined warning to 2024. This, Garland is saying, is a future we actually have a chance of avoiding.
But by all means, let’s keep politics out of it.
MPA rating: R (for strong violent content, bloody/ disturbing images and language throughout) Running time: 1:49
How to watch: In theaters