(courtesy IMP Awards)
One of the great joys of going to see movies in the cinema is when a film moves way beyond simply being something projected onto the screen and becomes an immersive experience that is so all-consuming that the real world ceases to exist and all that matters is the story playing out in front of you.
Use of the word “joy” does not mean this experience is always one of sunshine and light; when it comes to an excoriatingly intense film like Alex Garland’s Civil War, there’s little that’s innately pleasurable about the horrors depicted before you.
After all, you are watching a fractured United States, violently split apart, so it is intimated by a passing but crucial line of dialogue, by the actions of an authoritarian President in the White House (played by Nick Offerman) who has helped himself to a constitutionally prohibited third term and prosecuting with extreme prejudice a way to bring what he calls “insurrectionist” state back into a ruptured union.
There’s nothing enjoyable about watching war play out and as the combined Western Forces of California and Texas – in our reality these two states are politically and philosophically wide apart but Garland, who also wrote the film in addition to directing it, has made it clear that his is an alternate but all-too-real take on a possible multiversal United States – close in on Washington, D.C., it is clear that we will bear witness, through the eyes of the embedded photographers and journalists we are following, to some truly horrific acts.
So, not a joy from a storyline sense, but so well executed is Civil War, which primarily focuses on what happens to people in war rather than the war itself (though, of course, it is completely and rightly inescapable as a major contextual plot driver), that you are beguiled and utterly subsumed by how well Garland tells a very troubling tale.
And good lord, is it troubling.
As we join famed war photographer Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), her journalist colleague and close friend Joel (Wagner Moura) and their mutual long-time friend and veteran journalist Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), and tag-a-long newbie Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), who’s all enthusiasm but lacking in the street smarts of navigating a conflict, we come across again and again just how diabolically terrible human beings can be to each other.
On the drive from New York City to Washington D.C., which would normally take five or so hours but which is far more problematic and frighteningly involved in a time of war, these four people who really only have the word “PRESS” to protect them, and the willingness of combatants to treat that as something of tangibly protective value, are plunged to a range of situations that, while they slow the propulsive plot down a little, give Civil War the chance to bring the humanity which sits right at the heart of its storytelling right to the fore.
Without giving away too much, that technically short drive brings them into terrifyingly close contact with a range of militia forces guarding everything from petrol supplies through to mass graves, to snipers in houses to towns living in a twilight zone of denial, with every scene, no matter how outwardly benign, graphically illustrating that war boils away every last semblance of civilisation and that survival depends not on any notions of basic, communal humanity but of having the wits about you to avoid becoming yet another casualty.
It’s a harrowing way to live and as Lee, Joel, Sammy and Jessie make their way to Charlottesville to join massing Western Forces readying themselves for the big push into the almost-gone nation’s capital, we see again and again just how easily veneers of civility are sloughed off and how quickly once tightly-held notions fall to the wayside and are trampled with grievous intent underfoot.
War is by any measure a dark and nightmarish thing to experience but cleverly Civil War doesn’t vigorously and obvious beat this much-pounded drum, choosing instead to focus on the characters caught up in the hell of conflict and through their experiences bring home just how much damage being caught in up gunfire, bombing and incessant killing can do to a person.
Through the presence of veteran photo journalist Lee and the apprentice she unwilling takes on, we are granted intimate access to the toll war can take on someone, not simply in inuring them to the sort of horrific behaviour we would normally recoil from – tellingly it’s Jessie who completely this journey most fulsomely as she moves from innocent to blooded veteran in all-too-short week – but this sort of sealing off from reality mechanism actually doesn’t as those practising it seem to think it does.
The truth is that no one can ever wall themselves off from horror, grief and loss, and we see Lee and Joel both struggle mightily in ways that rend the soul and almost leave you crying yourself with trying to keep that distance between what they do and where they are, and their innate humanity, intact.
The truth is they can’t, and neither can an audience in a nuanced and sophisticated film which shows the evils and horrors of war but which always keep its focus tightly on the people caught up in this quite murderously violent of hells, all while treading carefully about the politics involved.
In that respect, Civil War rather brilliantly doesn’t draw direct allusions to the current troubled state of society and the body politic in America, and indeed doesn’t explore what led to the current violent schism in these once-United States, and it’s all for the future.
Most viewers, especially in the U.S. for whom Civil War will no doubt be a harrowing movie to watch given how literally close to home it is, will be all too aware that many aspects of the film have active corollaries in current events, but by obliquely and directly referencing them, Garland is able to imbue his story with an impactful examination of the horrors of war in general, an exploration of inherent racism, brutality and economic disparity in an unequal, fascistically brutalised society and a depiction of the great harm authoritarianism can do to a country or a people.
It results in a brilliantly thoughtful and crushingly immersive film that absolutely takes no prisoners, doesn’t let up in its supposedly quiet moments and which plunges you into a visceral experience of war, loss and societal breakdown that never lets up, shaking you to the core and establishing Civil War as quite possibly one of the best depictions of war to ever hit the big screen largely due to its rightful focus on the humanity and lack thereof of people caught up in something no one should ever experience and every country should seek to avoid with everything as their disposal.