When the trailer for Alex Garland’s Civil War came out late last year, I was nervous. Though I wanted to be excited, it had a vibe like it was going to miss the point with its political content. My fear was that it would be too on-the-nose, like Don’t Look Up. But now having seen Civil War, the problem is more the opposite: this film doesn’t have anything to say.
I think Garland sees this as a positive thing, and, indeed, some critics have praised the film’s “apoliticism.” I see this as a great failing of the film as it has been of many recent big movies. This movie called Civil War wants to ignore nearly everything about race and class that led to the first American civil war and would surely contribute to a second if we were to have one.
Civil War has moments when such realities almost appear and impact the narrative. When the group buys a tank of glass, there is talk of the now useless state of American currency, but apparently Canadian money holds power. A short while later they pass through a town that acts like the country isn’t at war, the young white shopkeeper seemingly having no problem keeping up her boutique. It’s a baffling scene, one that seems to condemn the war-avoidance stance of the shopkeeper without realizing that, as a film, it’s doing much the same thing. Civil War does put powerful war images on screen, but with no connection to any side or ideological position, their effectiveness only goes so far.
Race is similarly ignored for much of the film even as some of our main characters are not white. This aligns the film with so many other works of “colorblind” media that, in attempting to “not be racist,” fail to consider that ignoring race is also very racist. But one scene—easily the best scene in my mind—almost reveals the racial reality surely hiding beneath the surface. Here, Jesse Plemmons plays a militia man. It’s frustrating that the film doesn’t put him on one side or the other, but with his racist remarks and obsession with people speaking true American English, it’s not hard to figure out where he would fall at least in today’s America. It’s a tense scene in which our characters’ lives hang in the balance. It works because of the stakes of the moment, Plemmons’s performance, and because the images are tied to something. It’s the slightest flash of the racism that so obviously undergirds the film but that the film goes to excruciating lengths to ignore. For a moment that racial animus peeks through and we get a glimpse of a far better film that might have been possible if Garland had been willing to actually say something.
There are some highlights, though. Cailee Spaeny follows up her breakout performance in Priscilla with another very solid outing here even as her character doesn’t provide her much to work with. Kirsten Dunst is also good but, again, there aren’t many moments in this very thin script for her to actually shine. Still, these performances keep the film watchable even as it dragged to an inevitable and disappointing end.
This is certainly a film of diminishing returns that starts off with some interesting ideas before becoming a disjointed series of hit-and-miss road trip encounters that do little to explore the state of the world or the people within it. One would expect this to be a work of speculative fiction in which Garland takes the current partisan divides present in America and stretches them to an extreme end. And, even though Garland’s previous attempt to say something about a social issue (Men) was a clunky mess, one would think that he might be able to pull this off. This is the guy who pulled together the worlds of Ex Machina and Devs and adapted the “unadaptable” with Annihilation. One thing I never thought I would say about a Garland project was that the world building wasn’t there, and yet, the “civil war” premise is the thing about this film that works the least, hampering other semi-developed, and certainly interesting, ideas about journalistic integrity and what it means to report war.
One can watch Civil War and see the vague shape of a successful movie that explores the premise enough to give the ideas about journalism something to latch onto. We get a scene or two of what that would look like. And having that small taste of that other, better movie makes this “apolitical” mess even more disappointing.
2.5 out of 5 stars
