Civil War movie review: a craven view from nowhere ...

If we could possibly pinpoint a single solitary reason why the United States has gone to shit in recent decades — and I realize that finding just one reason is a bit of a stretch — it might be the “philosophy” that has gripped what has been passing for journalism for far too long: the notion of false balance, that there are two sides to every story and that both of these sides are equally valid, even in cases when this is not even remotely plausible.

Just one example: “Centuries of industrial civilization dumping massive quantities of carbon into the air is heating up the planet to a dangerous degree,” says one representative of the vast majority of climate scientists, versus “LOL, no it’s not,” says one of the few scientists who is a paid shill for a fossil-fuel company. This is not honest. This is not watchdog journalism. This is pandering to corporate influence. This is a recipe for a planetary suicide pact.

This is the milieu in which writer-director Alex Garland’s (Men, Ex Machina) spineless dystopian action drama Civil War is perfectly happy to sit. Here, the United States is mired in an internecine conflict the details of which we, the audience, are not made privy. We are given brief glimpses of a speech by the American president (Nick Offerman: The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part, Bad Times at the El Royale) as he rails against the insurrectionist “Western Forces” of *check notes* *does double take* Texas and California, two states that almost anyone playing attention to the actual current tinderbox situation in the real US would reasonably presume would be on opposite sides of any profound societal rift in America. We hear nothing from the Western Forces, certainly nothing that would lead us to appreciate why two states with such disparate cultures might band together, or even why they’ve rebelled. The lack of context for anything and everything occurring here feels like utter cowardice on Garland’s part, a default to the ruinous both-sides-ism that pretends that every perspective must be equally worthy. Why is America at war with itself? Probably good reasons on all sides? Bullshit.

But it gets worse. Civil War is not about the conflict but about the reporters covering it: photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst: The Beguiled, Hidden Figures) and her professional partner Joel (Wagner Moura: Elysium, Woman on Top), and their tagalongs, newbie Jessie (Cailee Spaeny: On the Basis of Sex, Pacific Rim: Uprising) and veteran Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson: Dune, Lady Bird). They’ve heard rumors of an impending assault on Washington DC by the Western Forces — forecasted to reach the capital on July 4th *rolls eyes* — and so they’re gonna hit the road from the battle they’ve just covered in New York City in the hopes of reaching DC in time to catch some good pix.

Garland thinks he’s championing journalists here, and to a tiny degree, he is: The cast is beyond terrific, but they deserve a far more courageous and insightful movie than this one. Spaeny, her Jessie spunky and sparky and about to learn hard lessons that will shock her out of her naivete, is physically unrecognizable from her turn as a very young Mrs Elvis Presley in last year’s Priscilla but psychologically similar in how she nicely balances a youngster’s enthusiasm with the awful realities she will encounter. Dunst carries the heavy weight of a war photographer’s experience with a weary sort of horror; her Lee explicitly states that, basically, she never imagined that the nightmares she had captured overseas would be repeated at home.

But Lee and Jessie, and Joel and Sammy, exist in a larger context, one that they understand and that we lack. They know — because of course they do, they live in this world — what the multiple sides of this conflict stand for. (The US seems to be split onto more factions than just two, but it’s difficult to tell.) Denying that context to those of us digesting their stories is not only unfair to us but unfair to the characters: we cannot make any sort of determination about what kind of journalism they are attempting to do. Are they aiming for an impossible “view from nowhere,” that faux objectivity of modern reportage that is so damaging? Or do they intend something more meaningful for their work? Garland’s own view from nowhere is an immense disservice to his characters.

There is some power in Civil War, especially visually: one image that has stuck with me is of a crashed military helicopter in a shopping-mall parking lot, a potent shattering of casual American capitalism, and of the relative calm and stability that allows it. There is a value, too, in a knock to American cultural complacency: depictions of the sort of civil unrest and outright urban warfare we are all too used to seeing on the news, happening in other faraway places and often with the complicity of the US government, should be a wakeup call alerting us to the very dangerous situation the US is in right now.

But instead, Garland has given us something dangerously irresponsible: a movie with Hollywood gloss — “experience it in IMAX” — at an incredibly precarious moment for the United States, when small-scale insurrection has already happened and wider conflict does not seem impossible. Civil War has nothing interesting or new to say about the journalism at its center, and with its pretense of “objectivity” it lacks any meaningful focus. I’m genuinely angry about Civil War in a way that few movies have ever made me.

more films like this: • A Private War [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK | BFI Player UK] • Bushwick [Prime US | Prime UK | Apple TV US | Apple TV UK]