Alex Garland’s newest release, CIVIL WAR, has people tying themselves in knots.
Its trailer suggests an apocalyptic America after Texas and California secede. Beige military vehicles race across empty roads. The most memorable image to distill this movie’s conflict is a man in red sunglasses and military fatigues (Jesse Plemons) who responds to the group’s pleas of claiming American brotherhood with a bloody-fingered face scratch and a callous “Ok, what kind of American are you?”
Before the movie was released, the images of D.C. under attack suggested an incoming future for Americans. What if the current polarization of our society erupted to violence? Who would win? What would our first world country look like compared to other developing countries that have split apart to save or subdue democracy?
But the conversation around this movie from viewers and critics coming out of theaters is that this isn’t the movie that was advertised. So what is it about?
If you haven’t seen the film, here’s the gist:
Our protagonist, Lee (Kirsten Dunst), is a famous war photographer walking in the footsteps of Lee Miller, as the starstruck rookie Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) clumsily points out. With her long-term colleague Joe (Wagner Moura), Lee wants to capture a picture of the President. The terms are loose: what do they want to ask or shoot? Viewers won’t know until they end, but they know they’re against the clock—and other journalists.
From the second scene, the photographers adjust to risk of being impossibly close to conflict. Jessie, new to war photography, takes a rogue arm to the face. Lee rushes to her aid, gives Jessie her highlighter yellow press vest as immunity, then shields Jessie with her own body from a drone strike. While Jessie is in shock, Lee goes to the quieted scene and shoots the officer and civilian corpses through her camera.
Joe and Lee plan to race down to barricaded D.C. before their rivals. Their veteran, cane-walking colleague Sammy (Stephen McKinley Harrison) reminds them that the President orders shots on approaching journalists, but he wants to join. By morning, Sammy and Jessie both ride in the back of Lee’s press van. This unlikely foursome has to travel over 800 miles to reach D.C. and travel by Pittsburgh through West Virginia to move past the barricades, blocked highways, and dangerous routes.
Predictably, there’s danger at every stop. Civilian men with (somewhat soothingly clacking) machine guns as they move the machinery from one arm to another. Hanging bodies dropped over bridges spray-painted with “GO STEELERS.” That man with the looted party glasses. Forests burning. Cars trailing them.
Some images conjure apocalypse movies, fitting for the filmmaker behind 28 Days Later and Annihilation. Crashed and abandoned cars on a blocked highway. The bombed destruction of historically significant landmarks in New York or D.C. The noise and soundtrack blare in your ears as does the popped, post-explosion silence. Every helicopter whirl or machine gun jump scare vibrates your bones.
For every gruesome image Jessie and Lee capture that fossilizes the callousness of violence, there’s birdsong and green lawns. Helicopters fly into a watercolor sunset. Natural beauty regrows where war, and the people orchestrating it, haven’t taken it over. Garland’s movies gravitate toward the what-if of potential disaster, either natural or man-made (like in Ex Machina). How do humans make conflict worse, despite their best attempts to control it?
Never is it explained how we arrived here. This is Garland’s primary intention and one of the biggest sticking points with audiences walking out.
How do Texas and California unite then turn against the United States? Unclear.
Why are the guerrilla fighters, dressed in Hawaiian button downs or dusted with pink, blue, and green stripes to signify the rebellion, shooting military? Don’t know.
What does either party want? How did we get here? No idea.
Viewers have the humanist urge to justify violence with a cause. If one side is a brutal dictator and the other is a pro-democracy grassroots, there’s a good side, but Garland doesn’t want to absolve either side of their contribution to this destruction. Murders or casualties can always be explained in the history books of the winner, but the journalists’ jobs are to determine in this moment who is right or wrong based on what they are seeing (though they gravitate toward anti-presidential sentiment throughout the film).
That said, it works as an idea, but it doesn’t work to demonstrate an American civil war. There are two ideas here: the desire to demonstrate the objective reporting of war violence, and the desire to demonstrate that America is just as likely as any other country to fall to an internal war. In order for these ideas to work together, there has to be more understanding on why America. Otherwise, it feels like transplanting other country’s contemporary civil wars—mixed with familiar destroyed-society apocalypse flavor—onto an American geography.
With this specific country in this specific moment of a bifurcated America, it feels disappointing to emphasize the American war element, then arrive to discover it’s really about a generic Any Country.
For those who have watched it already, here’s what I think about that ending (aka SPOILERS):
The cast and their performances are top notch. Dunst as Lee imagines years of experience witnessing war crimes through her camera and forms her face into a mask. This forced stoicism gives her a frustrated affect, but the flatness of her inflections and expressions is her ability to cope. By taking Jessie under her wing, Lee softens, even smiles. Jessie, as Sammy points out, reminds both of them of Lee’s younger self starting in this line of work. Lee’s softening toward Jessie, and therefore the pain she endured throughout her career, becomes her destruction.
Meanwhile, Jessie under Lee’s guidance becomes bolder. At the start of their journey, she cries about watching a man at a gas station torture and murder other men (for no given reason). Lee snaps at her to shake it off, that the job requires them to avoid asking “what if” or else they can’t move forward. Jessie shakes it off and develops her own mask. It’s hard to tell in this dilapidated society what Jessie wants—global recognition? a higher moral like truth? There’s no Pulitzers handed out when the universities shut down, but Jessie has a natural taste for it, and like a dog who has broken skin, she can’t stop once she’s tasted it.
Consequently, she becomes more comfortable with Lee, asking about her childhood and parents as if they were peers. She stages a portrait of Lee trying on a dress in a small town deliberately ignorant of the civil war. Jessie gets her to smile. When another group of journalists pull up to the press van, hopping through windows into the next car, Jessie jumps into the neighboring car. It speeds away, and Lee is left to slam on the gas to catch up.
The crew finds the abandoned car at the Victorian home of the Jesse Plemons’ character. Turns out, Plemons is one of a group of mass murderers with a dump truck of bodies. (Plemons also crushes this scene for the three minutes he’s involved, living up to the trailer hype.) Sammy, who stayed back due to his inability to run, drives the press van over Plemons (another zombie movie trope) and saves the crew. Jessie, who landed in the mass grave, has to crawl over dozens of dead bodies to pull herself out. The overhead of this shot, her marine crawl over limbs and faces, echoes of other global horros (like the Holocaust), and its familiarity subtracts from the visual shock of the image. Sammy drives them back to the highway, though not before a hidden military man (hiding under the dump truck?) comes out and shoots at the press-mobile. This press truck must be bullet proof!
But not that bullet proof. Sammy catches a bullet in the fallout from leaving that house. (He catches the bullet on his right side from the driver seat, and the shot must have come from behind where the shooter was, but no one in the backseat had any injuries. But what do I know about the believability of war!) The crew all worries, but no one grabs him any gauze or attempts to stop the bleeding?
They drive through this sparkling forest on fire while Sammy bleeds out. The sparks fly over the car windows like an orange snow. Sammy gazes at it in wonder. Jessie, also in the backseat, stares at him.
(Note: Is the forest fire a political act or just chaos? An elaborate metaphor for the death of an innocent thing? We don’t know, and this car full of journalists doesn’t ask. In fact, Sammy and Joe are reporters—as in, they collect facts and interviews to construct a textual version of events to accompany the photos—but not once do they pull out a tape recorder or notebook. Joe has an affable approach to strangers and a desire to be on the frontlines, running alongside the military with a kevlar vest, but not once does he ever take a single quote, note or recording, though Jessie and Lee obsess over their virtual uploads and traveling development kits. It’s not until the end that Wagner Moura’s Joe runs up to the President pre-execution and says “WAIT! I need a quote.” Dude, what?!)
Sammy’s a corpse in the backseat by the time the press-mobile pulls up to the secessionist base camp, full of tanks and military supplies like any American army. Later, Lee goes through her digital camera roll. She shot Sammy, her old mentor, with his corpse resting against the closed car window. She deletes it. The tough veteran who shot a snarky “What do you think?” when Jessie asks if Lee would shoot her being shot now has to face the boundaries of her work. Not every photograph needs to be saved.
Lee, Jessie, and Joe approach the White House for the opportunity to “shoot” the President, and Lee collapses. As Jessie’s radicalized adrenaline makes her jump into dangerous positions to capture any shot on her dad’s old cameras, Lee screams and cries. Joe stands over her body and watches Jessie risk her life over and over again, lost in capturing the right shot. (It’s giving dad with two kids at a playground, constantly yelling “get over here!!!” while giving distracted consolation to the child who weeps.)
Though decoy White House limos leave the White House, Lee realizes how close she is to the shot she’s wanted since the beginning and suspects that the President is still in the Oval Office. Joe and Jessie follow her, and Jessie repeatedly stands where she shouldn’t, at risk of being gunned down by the President’s remaining defense. The black and white shots Jessie takes play on screen through the chaos, giving us an eye into her POV and budding talent at capturing the collapse of a democracy. (While Lee’s digital allows her to curate and delete, Jessie’s film camera requires her to develop and keep every photo.)
When Lee steps out in front of her to catch a bullet, Jessie captures four shots of Lee standing above her with a reprimanding and maternal look, a look of pain at being shot, then a lifeless collapse. Jessie shakes off her shock and leaves her mentor’s dead body on the red carpet of the White House to capture the shot her mentor always wanted—the shot of the dead President.
If this isn’t a film about war but about the arbiters who document war for us, it’s important what we take away from Jessie’s evolution. Is she dislikable or noble?
Jessie, through her evolution of emotional to masked like Lee, is a child seeking her own interests. She’s an adrenaline junkie who chases the rush and ignores the real life consequences of the horrors around her to make sure she gets the shot. Is this a story about ambition? Or a Heart of Darkness descension into the horror of humanity? It would be easier to tell if the viewers could feel the horror as organic, refreshing, and new. This dynamic of Jessie and Lee, a story about a mentee overtaking the person who taught her the ropes, is muddied with the other questions about the world.
Though this movie is not supposed to be about the civil war itself, even the press points to audiences feeling uncomfortable with the movie because of its ambiguous political sides. They imagine that liberals leave the theaters saying, “But which side is Trump?! Which side are we!!!”
But that post-movie discussion plays into the ambiguity instead of focusing on what the ambiguity wants us to watch instead. This makes the movie harder to cut through. There shouldn’t be a clean and clear message—“here’s what we feel about war” or “this is what the bad guys in war do”—but there should be less confusion.
Garland wanted ambiguity to demonstrate violence without the surrounding context. This puts the camera on the journalists who capture the images, who have to force objectivity to capture the horror of war from either side. But war photography exists to distill an entire conflict in a single image. Without knowing the conflict, the images don’t carry a history. They only act as a vessel for more violence. In this film, we have plenty of images—beauty mixed with horror, soft smiles and life-or-death consequences—but none of them give us a sharp arrow into the story. In some ways, this movie acts as a vessel for the desensitized emptiness of violence that it argues against.
During the movie, I found myself enticed by the beauty of the shots scene to scene and would come up for air and break out of the reverie to say, “But what does this scene say when you put it against all the other scenes?” I would have to wonder what it all meant stacked on top of each other. There’s a missing thread to hold the beads on the necklace, and that narrative gap leaves us with more questions about the movie than thoughts about the questions it wants to raise.