Jonah Naplan   April 13, 2024

Extremely pertinent and terrifying in a way that makes you scared to leave the confines of your own home, Alex Garland’s “Civil War” has the visceral and emotional power of our era’s official “big statement” movie, with all the necessary fixings of a moviegoing experience that this generation won’t ever be able to shake. It’s somehow thrilling, funny, smart, and deeply disturbing all at the same time. Single images have more power than entire movies. Individual characters have more depth than entire ensembles. The plot is more thematically dense than whole franchises. “Civil War” realizes its power early on, and immediately thrusts us into the thick of a battle within our own country, one that seems oddly and unnervingly familiar. It is not the professionally-shot battle sequences that will stick with you (though they are very impressive), but the footage of protests and violent outbreaks that echo the first-person handiwork of the January 6th insurrection on the U.S. Capitol (and at times it feels as though the horrifying last three minutes of Spike Lee’s “BlacKkKlansman” have been drawn out to feature length). This is a major movie.

“Civil War” will not satisfy everyone, especially those who refuse to accept what it is as a political thinkpiece, and also those who are under the impression that it will just be that. The movie is so many things, comprised of so many parts, all of them completely and totally relevant because of Garland’s reckoning that if these events were to actually happen in real life, it wouldn’t all play out in straight lines. The plot has both a literal and figurative sense to it; the literal side depicts the story of four journalists—Lee (Kirsten Dunst), Joel (Wagner Moura), Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson)—who are rushing to the White House to interview the President (Nick Offerman) before the Western Alliance—comprised of California and Texas—get to him first. Along their road trip, they encounter a murderer’s row of unfriendly faces, all of whom either want to hurt the quartet, or expose them to more of the reality of what’s going on here. The peak of this terror arrives when they come across a soldier played by Jesse Plemons whose red sunglasses and condescending sneer makes him a perfect foil to their ethical values.

The figurative side is what we don’t see but still know is going on, in other states, towns, and families; perhaps the scariest parts of the entire movie. We’re told so much but see so little, which is what’s so intriguing and unsettling about it. We’re never told exactly how this turmoil began because “Civil War” sorta drops us right into the midst of it, so it’s up to the watcher to decide and then deliberate with their viewing partner afterwards about what the real explanation could be. Alex Garland illustrates this idea by never taking a specific side on the matter, and simply telling what is and isn’t, criticizing outlets and other news forums that don’t do the same.

The characters in this movie are all one of two things: mediators of the war who are simply trying to capture crucial moments through photographs, or hotshots attempting to prove themselves in a field that they care about but one that has been increasingly difficult to make a dent in because of the current political and social crises. Lee is one of Jessie’s heroes, and Spaeny’s character spends most of the movie trying to establish herself as an aspiring war photographer of comparable skill. As “Civil War” unfolds, it becomes more and more clear that Garland is trying to make as much of a statement on the dictatorial version of America that this film depicts (Offerman’s president is clearly supposed to be symbolic of Trump, except that the domestic violence seems to be pointed towards him instead of against), as he is on the state of competitive journalism that turns into as much of a sport as football and hockey.

Violence in this movie is shown head-on and portrayed as spontaneous. If it’s not depicted entirely in focus, then that’s only because something else is happening in the foreground. Singular images have power as slices of sheer gore and brutality in a way that will likely live in my head forever. The harshest critics will argue that it is “too much” or “inappropriate” to display such rancid imagery redolent of hate crimes and mass genocide, and on the contrary, it is rancid, but that’s exactly the point. Any horrible or uncomfortable feeling you may have while watching “Civil War” has been put there intentionally by Garland and it’s as clear a sign as any that the movie is working.

In the next few months, you’ll read two types of articles about “Civil War” and how it plays into Alex Garland’s filmography. The first group will tell you that it’s completely consistent with his other movies—“Ex Machina,” “Annihilation” and “Men,” which are all sci-fi—because America is too reliant on its state-on-state relationships and infrastructure that “Civil War” can’t be anything but fiction, while the other group will try to claim that “Civil War” is Garland’s only potentially non-fiction project, using January 6th to demonstrate that “anything is possible” for this country as long as there’s enough motivation. Both sides are right. Both sides are wrong. “Civil War” is great because it has the verve to live in a morally gray area that defines it as a compendium of the body politic made of multiple perspectives, ideas, people, causes and effects. That it contains so much makes it ascend into a new realm of mystery as to what it all means. And that’s exactly the point. Individual shots can be both beautiful and terrifying, with cinematographer Rob Hardy—who worked with Garland on all his previous projects—framing the violence in a way that questions how much domestic war can be glorified in the media. Of course, the people need to be informed, but where do we draw that line between informative and argumentative reporting? Does censoring certain images because they’ll certainly be upsetting stimuli to most viewers count as “taking a side”? And what is the difference between holding back the truth and mildly adjusting the facts so that the population won’t get too worried?

The four journalists in “Civil War” don’t seem to care one bit about censoring the violence; in fact, they inch up close to it when given the opportunity. In the midst of a dramatic scene, a shot will pause for a moment to cut to the still photo that Jessie has captured—as it dawns on her, we too realize that she has preserved this horrifying moment for the eyes of posterity. Sometimes her stills come out blurry because they were captured in the middle of intense motion, others perfectly preserve that “sweet spot” of a moment in time that’s inherently picturesque in nature. All of them are disturbing, and derive influence from real footage that we’ve seen in the media, making the abrasive, shaky-cam style of the first fifteen minutes, especially, feel like a documentary that uses violence in place of heads talking in front of a screen.

Much of the third act portrays the attempted siege of Washington, D.C., with all the passion and ardor of a Roland Emmerich disaster movie. Each gunshot, however, feels painful, because we know it’s being aimed towards something or someone important on our own sacred soil. It’s deeply upsetting, in a way that gets under your skin and stays there long after the movie has ended. Seeing this sequence in IMAX is the real deal, and the recurrent reverberation of gunshots, grenades, and bombs will haunt me for a long time. It’s deafening. You’ll want to plug your ears. Not because it’s loud (though it is), but because of the emotions of what each of those big booms mean.

If “Civil War” is not entirely appreciated now, it will certainly be in twenty years, when we’ll either look back and shudder at how well it predicted the future, or laugh at how it didn’t. Think about movies like “Back to the Future Part II” and “Blade Runner” that presented visions about eras we’ve already passed, and still haven’t satisfied what they prescribed. “Civil War” ends on a note that seems to close out this story abruptly, but doesn’t expand beyond that. The violence just is. It exists without reaction. No humanity. We should all be able to agree we don’t want America to turn out like that.

Now playing in theaters.