His first film since 2022’s confused rural horror Men, Alex Garland’s return to screens sees the writer-director back on form with an intelligent blockbuster that may well be his most accomplished film to date. Civil War, though imperfect, is a biting, satirical blockbuster that is as much about the alienation of modern media as it is about imagining a second American Civil War.
In the dying days of the Second American Civil War, the secessionist Western Forces of California and Texas prepare to invade Washington DC and seize victory. In an address to the fractured nation, US President (Nick Offerman) puts a brave face on things, but journalists Lee (Kirsten Dunst), Joel (Wagner Moura) and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) can see the writing on the wall. They hatch a plan to drive across the country to DC to secure an interview with the President before the Republic finally crumbles. As the trio make their plans, aspiring photographer Jessie (Caillee Spaeny) hitches a ride along with them, hoping to make a career-making turn on the road and learn from her hero, Lee.
As the shadow of a second Trump presidency looms, Civil War’s real-life inspiration is all too obvious, but this is not a one-to-one reflection of historical reality. Having Texas and California as the secessionist forces is a deliberate act of contextual distancing, and all the more powerful is its satire for it. Civil War is not an attack on Trumpism per se, but rather, a study of the relationship between media and conflict, and its alienating effects on the nature of violence. Told through the eyes primarily of the veteran Lee and callow Jessie, Civil War is less a film about an imagined American apocalypse and more about the media’s everyday dehumanising relationship with violence.
Critical to this is Garland’s decision to expunge any explicit politics or context for his conflict. The President, in a small role, is neither recognisably Democrat nor Republican; there is never any explanation for the secession of the Western Forces. And yet, as they storm the White House in a nightmarish refraction of our own political moment, Civil War puts the lie to the myth of journalistic neutrality. As Lee, Jessie and their companions make their journey, their involvement and invariably their complicity in the atrocities that they document become ever harder to ignore. After one harrowing incident, Lee scolds Jessie for becoming emotionally involved: “We don’t ask questions, we record”, a rule for coping as much for ethical distance. Yet it becomes clearer by the mile that that distance has taken its toll on Jessie’s soul, and by the film’s close, the policy ofnon-intervention has become a fallacy; the storming of the Capitol is fundamentally a depiction of violence mediated, constructed and disseminated as soon as it is produced.
Civil War is not entirely successful in its ambitions. Garland’s decision to completely decontextualise his conflict feels contrived at times, and risks being so vaguely shaped as to be meaningless. So too is the road trip, whose climax is pre-determined from the start and thus lacking a degree of tension, while it is never really in doubt where our main characters are likely to end up. Nevertheless, Garland has always been exceedingly good at hiding social satire under the guise of bombastic action and genre (see also Ex Machina and Dredd). As arguably his best and certainly biggest film to date, Civil War is certainly no different in that regard.
Christopher Machell