Film Review: ‘Civil War’ (2024)

Civil War, released six weeks ago, has done well at the box office, so it pleased the masses. Among professional critics, the verdict seems to be largely positive as well, which can perhaps be explained by the fact that reviewers can basically choose their own adventure in deciding what the film is actually about.

The set-up of the film is that a civil war has been raging in America for some time. The President—played by Nick Offerman, best-known to me as “Ron Swanson” from Parks and Recreation—has entered his third term in office and has the loyalty of the north east and most of middle America, as well as New Mexico, Arizona, and Nevada. He is facing rebellion on three fronts: from the Western Forces (WF) that oddly unites California and Texas; from the Florida Alliance that comprises much of the old Confederacy; and from the New People’s Army that brings together the north-east, stretching from Washington State across to Minnesota plus Utah. The story is told from the perspective of a group of journalists who journey to Washington, D.C., as the WF closes in.

One take is that the film is really about journalism and war reporting specifically. This is obviously partly true: it shows the difficult circumstances war correspondents work in, the risks they take, the grisly events they witness, and the effects this has upon them. Whether it makes cinematic sense to show the story through their eyes is more dubious, and even in these terms there is a shallowness. The presentation of the journalists—especially the two main female photojournalists—as pure-hearted chroniclers of the Truth rather occludes how many war journalists are thrill-seekers, for example. One would not be casting any aspersions on the value of their work to include this. It would merely be an acknowledgment that people and their motives are complicated. And this is not the only complexity omitted.

Writer and director Alex Garland is British, but he seems to rely on the audience having a very Americanised view of the sacredness of journalism. One of the few indications we are given about the wickedness of the President’s rule, which is otherwise assumed without adumbration, is that government troops are said to kill journalists on sight. This is obviously appalling—if they are journalists. During the long Cold War, there were at all times numerous Western “journalists” who were agents for the Soviet Union, deeply involved in political warfare to assist in Communism’s mission to enslave the world. The difficulty of people posing as “journalists” while functioning as media activists for combatants persists to the present day. It is not morally simple how to treat such actors.

Civil War somewhat wades into this issue without appearing to realise it. Our protagonists in the final third embed with the WF and show every sign of sympathising with at least with WF’s goal of bringing down the President. What the journalists do not show is any objection to the WF’s atrocious behaviour, specifically its persistent habit of murdering captive and surrendering opponents even when they are unarmed. All the journalists do is indifferently take photographs of the killings, which is an odd form of “neutrality”. If the President had been shown as a lawless and murderous despot, whose officials and army were essentially criminal, perhaps the audience would understand the WF’s conduct as rough justice. There is no such presentation, however. There is no backstory about what the President has done and the President has barely two minutes of screentime. We hear some stray remarks about government atrocities, but far and away the worst-behaved on-screen forces are the WF.

Which brings us to the main defect of the film: it is a war film without politics, and, as the cliché has it, war is politics by other means. The lack of explanation for why the war broke out and what the sides are fighting for creates a yawning vacuum at the heart of the story, leaving the viewer confused about what is happening and giving them little reason to care. This blank canvas of a plot is what has allowed reviewers to doodle in their own understanding of what the film’s message is, which by pure coincidence tends to align with their own political and moral beliefs. Kirsten Dunst, one of the film’s leads as photojournalist “Lee Smith”, has claimed this was deliberate. Maybe. An explanation equally consonant with the facts is that the writer did not have the courage to take an explicitly political stand in an America where paying viewers are this polarised, and the result was not an artistic ambiguity, but an underdeveloped script.

A counter-argument to this is that the film is about war and the pointlessness is the point; one is meant to focus on the “the horror” and the way war makes monsters out of everyone as predation becomes the only way to survive in a collapsed landscape. Dunst’s character suggests this at one stage, saying that via her work in foreign theatres of war, “I thought I was sending a message home: Don’t do this.” The problem is that the film does not quite give an all-sides-are-equally-bad presentation.

The journalists—our babyfaces—definitely show an affinity for the rebels. The Donald Trump-like mannerisms of the President—refusing to stick to the traditional two-term limit, bombastically claiming a “historic victory” as the rebels surround his White House—identifies our heel. Here again, the light-touch Trumpiness of the President feels less like artistic subtlety and more like commercial cowardice: the writer both wanted to allude to a Trumpian tyrant and leave enough room for it to be deniable to reduce the costs in criticism and revenue, since Republicans watch movies, too. Above it all, the film plays on the general sympathy of this modernity with “change” and revolution to tilt the scales in the rebels’ favour.

Still, Dunst is right this far: the script is so threadbare that if one does not share the ideological presumptions the film is aimed at, one can come away with a quite different understanding. Should one happen to believe going into the movie that a legitimate Sovereign assailed by rebellion is duty-bound to do whatever is necessary to suppress the insurrectionists—who bear the full responsibility for the war’s consequences—and one sees in Civil War no evidence that the President has overstepped the bounds seriously enough to warrant overthrow by a paramilitary force that behaves like a criminal gang, one could, in a most unexpected coincidence, come away from the movie believing the message is about the dangers of defying authority and disorder.