"Civil War"

  ☆☆ 

Journalists and war have been an incendiary coupling in movies almost as long as there have been movies, and with good reason: A journalist's obligation to objectivity can't help but clash with the realities of war. Even the most dispassionate reporter or photographer falls victim to compassion and humanity.

Alex Garland's Civil War proposes, in theory, at least, to explore this effective topic from a totally new perspective. The movie supposes that a civil war has engulfed the United States, and follows journalists assigned to cover it. There's almost no way such an incendiary idea could go wrong. Almost. At every opportunity, though, this movie, which Garland wrote and directed, gets it all disastrously wrong. The movie takes no stance—either on the war it depicts or, more awfully, on the role journalists play in bringing that war to the world.

What do the reporters in Civil War even do? About two-thirds of way through, we learn that at least one of them, possibly two, work for Reuters. The name is given not because of Reuters' role as a global news organization, but because it sounds foreign. Until then, all we've known is that another of the journalists works for The New York Times, though he never seems to file a story or report on anything, while another is ... well, not even a journalist.

Jesse (Cailee Spaeny) a fresh-faced, innocent 23-year-old who idolizes Lee (Kirsten Dunst), a gruff, hard-nosed war photographer who has seen atrocities around the world but has never seen anything like this. Or maybe she has. We never really learn her position on the war, nor that of Joel (Wagner Moura), ostensibly the reporter of the bunch, nor of Sam (the ever-reliable Stephen McKinley Harrison), that New York Times reporter. Lee and Joel are on their way from New York City to the front lines of Washington, D.C., where they want to interview the president. He's a third-term hardliner, though of what variety we're never told. At the beginning of Civil War, he's professing a near-victory against the "Western Forces," a coalition of Texas and California. Florida is allied with the Western Forces.

That's what kind of movie Civil War is. It seems almost proudly oblivious of the politics of the moment (if a "moment" can last close to a decade), and in interviews Garland has said he wanted to make a movie about journalists and war, not about the causes of war. It's a near-fatal decision for his film. Imagine Casablanca without a sense of loyalties; imagine Inglourious Basterds without taking sides; imagine The Killing Fields in which there is no Khmer Rouge, just a lot of fighting.

It's not as if Garland doesn't tip his hat more than once to what might be going on. The clearest villains in Civil War all talk with drawls, look like central casting was asked for "hillbillies," and spit a lot. One of them, in a much-talked-about cameo by Jesse Plemons, has a real problem with minorities. But the movie still refuses to tell us anything. The journalists are conflicted, because they see too many people gunned down, sometimes without reason. What they see is hard to stomach.

But there's no effort to help us understand it. Are we to be surprised that war is hell? That an America engulfed in a true civil war would be a horrifying sight?

The movie leads up to a CG-laden battle replete with all the macho bravado of a modern video game. Logically, nothing about the climax makes sense, particularly the fact that, other than a couple of embedded journalists, there seem to be no other reporters around. In the world of Civil War, there are only about four journalists left, they never file stories or send photos (well, once), and the impact of their work is unknown. It's not the only thing about Civil War that's unknown. Including why anyone would want to make a movie like this and then take out everything that might make it interesting.

Viewed April 27, 2024 — AMC Burbank 16

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