Review: Civil War

By Simon McCarthy      Not sure /10 Stars

I was pretty intrigued by the prospect of a film about a civil war happening right now in North America, because maybe, it’s possible somehow… right ? Like in real life…It could happen …? You know, because of Trump and all the Capitol riot stuff ?  But the films plot was drowned out by gunfire early on and so we never really worked out what was going down. Which was a pity because you know it could have been sort of useful to talk about how it got to that point, right? I mean, just in case... and anyhow, we were told back in 1970 that “the revolution won’t be televised,” and WTF now it is ?

The story is set in the closing days of a war that kicked off after a president decided to stay in power longer than he was entitled to, then disbanded the FBI and pulled some other stunts I can’t remember. This resulted in an implausible alliance between California and Texas, which marches east to do battle with the presidential forces. The writer-director  Alex Garland (Ex Machina, 28 Days Later, Annihilation) says he paired these two politically dissimilar states deliberately to make a point that what united them, i.e. respect for the constitution, outweighed what divided them, i.e., red-blue headwear.

We follow a group of journalists led by Kirsten Dunst  (Spiderman, Melancholia, The Power of the Dog),  who have decided to get the biggest scoop in history by driving across the war torn country to try to interview the embattled president who is holed up in the White House. A young aspiring photographer played by Cailee Spaeny (love saying that name) latches on to the group and undergoes a baptism of fire under Dunst’s watchful eye.

Garland uses the clever device of having the story unfold through the eyes of the journalists as a way to simply “report the events” rather than interpret them. This works fine for them, but leaves us feeling rather short-changed.

Their fraught road trip takes them through a series of discrete interactions along the way, ranging from a wilfully ignorant shopkeeper seemingly unaware of the momentous events unfolding around her, to the pant-pissingly scary, fully aware character played by Jesse Plemons (Breaking Bad, Fargo). He again plays a psychopathic ice cold killer, a familiar role for him. In case you didn’t know, in real life he is married to Kirsten Dunst.

From another interaction, we determine if we work backwards from the price of a sandwich at a gas station, that inflation is running at close to 6000%, and that the US dollar no longer enjoys its dominant reserve currency status. Having armed crazies swarming over the country wouldn’t necessarily be all that unusual or revolutionary, but paying $50 a gallon for fuel would do it.  

The clearest explanation offered as to why citizens might want to fight other citizens was offered by a sniper to a journalist while he was concentrating on the downrange target in his rifle’s scope. “Someone is trying to kill us; we are trying to kill them.” This seemed to be all the intellectualising deemed necessary for the carnage to proceed.

The music and soundscape are outstanding features of the film and again show Garlands willingness to go wherever necessary to realise the artistic goals of the film. A link to a Spotify playlist appears below.

The action scenes, fight choreography stunts, etc. were all very accomplished, except in one regard, the little troop of reporters are constantly, implausibly, and literally on the elbows of the soldiers during the many firefights. This jars and looks wrong and is akin to that thing where if somebody is following someone in a movie, they never seem to be more than a few feet behind them and yet are never noticed. This is where a suspension of disbelief is asked for due to an unknown (by me) cinematic constraint… I think.

The sound of gunfire has changed over time. In the old black-and-white Westerns, most bullets made a ricochet noise as they bounced off a rock, they sound less stylised now, I guess people's aim has also improved over the years, maybe something to do with the fact that an incredible 5 billion rounds are fired annually in the US.

 Over the course of the movie my shot counting App registered the discharge of over 2000 individual rounds; this does not include several sustained bursts from a helicopter’s mini gun, which are too high a RPM to register on the app, so say 4000 rounds all up. Various other weapons include a C14/B shoulder launched “Column Cutter” surface to surface missile that is used on the Lincoln Memorial. These missiles developed during the Culture Wars can be set for all the major classical column types: Ionic, Doric, Corinthian. I suspect the one we see in the film was set incorrectly. Anyway, all in all, the film lies in the mid to upper range of the Shoot'em’ Up gunfire index. (SUGI)

I would like to admire Alex Garland enormously and thank him profusely for many reasons I have not at this stage fully determined but not least that he is apparently a fan of John Wyndham’s writing and Brian Eno’s music. His film Annihilation is an almost perfect sci-fi classic. Garland doesn’t back away from the fact that Civil War is a political film. But I think there was a missed opportunity to turn the camera back on the whole Hollywood edifice, to maybe throw some light on how things have unravelled so badly. How culpable is Hollywood itself and the media in general in building fake realities for people to live in that can sometimes jump the fence and end up uninvited in other people's realities.

 Having a go at a film called Civil War eight months out from what will likely be the most momentous US election since Lincoln was installed 164 years ago, where the possibility for some degree of armed conflict is no longer totally inconceivable, is quite a challenge, even for someone of Alex Garland's abilities. It would be too much of an ask to have a film find solutions for all the ills in society, and just because some of the real world problems can be traced back to Hollywood and the media more broadly, it doesn’t necessarily follow that this is where the solutions lie. What the film does is let us spend 1 hour and 49 minutes living in one extreme scenario, and it’s a place no sane person would wish to be. But there are other better scenarios out there, and maybe this is the true strength of the film, not just as a cautionary tale but by moving the story on past the dread of a looming confrontation and letting us skip forward to a space where other less destructive narratives can be explored and talked about.

This is an imagined scene for the film.

The underlying message is anti gun but it could still sort of fit in the overall story.

The scene occurs early on in the film when Lee has reluctantly agreed to let Jessie go with them into the war zone. They get out of the car and are walking through some ravaged town, Lee sees Jessie pick something up of the ground in the distance, we are not sure what it is.

Lee sidles up to Jessie.

“What you got?”

Jessie stares back at Lee, who puts her upturned hand out in front of Jessie, waiting…

Jessie goes slowly   into her backpack and pulls out a handgun,

“You know guns  Jessie ?”

“Not really”

“Why did you pick it up?”

“because I’m scared, I guess.”

“You think this will make you safer ? ” As she talks, Lee dismantles the weapon without looking and throws the parts away. “And how do you think it would have played out at the next roadside search ? “

Jessie remains silent

Lee taps her forefinger forcefully on the Press card Jessie is wearing, “this is what can keep you safe, mostly, that, (Lee gestures in the direction of the disassembled gun.) IS WHAT GETS US ALL KILLED.”