While some have praised the film's commitment to just dropping the viewer into the conflict and letting them figure it out, Garland doesn't really give the viewer enough information to figure anything out - which is a little ironic, considering all the main characters are journalists and at least one of the themes in this murky film is "how far should you go in your commitment to document the truth?" Turns out these guys will do pretty much anything to get the story, they just can't be bothered telling it to anyone.
So while the President (Nick Offerman, seen only briefly at the beginning and end of the film) is presented as a babbler disconnected from reality, well, name a recent President who wasn't. All we know of his political achievements is that he disbanded the FBI, messed around with the rules as far as drone strikes on American citizens, and had a third term. Sure, maybe he's a fascist dictator; maybe he disbanded the FBI because of its long history of abusing civil rights and ran for a third term because the country was already at war with itself. We don't know.
Not only do we have a conflict with no cause, we have a conflict that's clearly not designed to reflect current warfare. There are no drones; the US Navy must have decided to sit it out because one aircraft carrier parked outside Washington DC would have ended the war in about half an hour. Military technology is roughly on the level of the Vietnam War, or maybe Gulf War One: tanks, automatic weapons, rocket launchers, humvees.
The scenes of war we're shown are also generic. There are gun battles and refugee camps, armed guards at stores and looters hung and tortured. There's a mass grave, a sniper who seems to be shooting indiscriminately, a suicide bomber. These scenes are always effective and often chilling, but for a generation of viewers used to zombie movies and The Walking Dead, or just who've seen Spielberg's War of the Worlds, it's all pretty much what you'd expect.
Likewise, our lead characters are the kind of war correspondents that are familiar from wars gone by. These are photojournalists who still shoot on film; while there's one mention of an upload, and we're told there's no phone service, digital cameras don't seem to be a thing. Characters work for Reuters or "what's left of the New York Times"; nobody's posting pictures of war crimes on social media.
So the war is a metaphor; we have to look elsewhere for meaning. It's tempting to look at the characters: Lee (Kirsten Dunst) is a war-weary photographer, Joel (Wagner Moura) is her slightly more enthusiastic journalist buddy. They're planning to go to Washington DC to interview the President before his regime falls. Tagging along is fresh-faced newcomer Jesse (Cailee Spaney), who is just starting out as a photojournalist and who idolises Lee, and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a senior writer who is tagging along on what might be the last big story of his career.
There are some obvious moves here. Jessie is going to learn what it takes to make it, Lee is going to have to figure out if this is still what she wants to do with her life. Garland sketches all this stuff in off-handedly, though the performances are strong. It's tempting to suggest this is a film about the cost of being detached and the price you pay as an individual for journalistic detachment.
These are people able to dispassionately observe their own country tear itself apart, working the shutter of their cameras as their homeland dies in front of them. There's a cost to that, and as we get to the climax of the film some characters embrace that cost and others question it. But the film is barely interested in its characters as people; much of the film simply requires them to be observers, their own stories largely kept in the background.
What the film is more interested in is the end of the USA. The opening is the President getting ready to give a speech about how the separatists have been crushed, and the system as we know it is set to be restored. It's not until a few scenes later that we realise he's full of shit. The US government has lost the war, and everyone expects the President to be dead within weeks.
That conversation between journalists also sketches in the basic state of play across the nation; there's at least three separate factions out there, and only their hatred of the President and his forces is keeping them united. While the film as it progresses seems to be driving towards a firm conclusion, we've already been told that no end is in sight.
Everything we see in the film - constant lethal violence, rampant mistrust, an unending sense of threat behind every action - is now and for the foreseeable future the status quo in America. This explains why the war is so basic, so hand-to-hand: it's not about forces fighting for territory or resources, it's about a country where neighbour wants nothing more than to murder their neighbour.
What gives Civil War it's power - and despite its many flaws and flat patches, it does end up a powerful film - is that it ends up gleefully reveling in the disaster it portrays, a zombie movie that says we deserve to be eaten. The state of the nation is a nightmare, the film says, where friend has turned against friend, brother against brother. And the solution is to find someone to blame.
The final act of the film involves the storming of Washington and the White House, and it's easily the high point of the film. Garland kicks things into pure action mode as we follow a military unit (and our tag-along leads) as they fight their way into the war torn city, complete with monuments coming under fire. Civil War is seemingly about the importance of a media committed to objectivity, but the film itself only comes to life when it's reveling in the fruits of bias and division.
Going by the current state of US political discourse no doubt there's a large audience out there right now keen to see either their current or the previous head of state gunned down like a dog. The President here is kept so vague he could be from either party or neither; he's politically a blank slate, simply "The President".
Civil War says the desire for this kind of thing is a poison that will tear the country apart, and then it serves that poison right on up.
- Anthony Morris
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