CIVIL WAR Review

Alex Garland Tears America to Shreds

In 1994 Kevin Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for Feature Photography. He was a member of what was known as The Bang Bang Club, a quartet of conflict photographers in South Africa as the era of apartheid ended, bringing with a phase of intense and factional violence. The Bang Bang Club - colleagues but not coworkers - were drawn to the most intense fighting. One of them, Ken Oosterbroek, was killed during the skirmishes. 

In 1993 Carter went to Sudan to document the increasingly horrific famine; he took a photo that became a front page sensation and drew new attention to what had been an ongoing crisis. In the foreground is a little African boy*, maybe a toddler, hunched over with her face on the ground, both bloated and skeletal all at once. Behind her, lurking in the near distance, is a vulture. The photo is a gut punch, the girl’s immediate mortal peril all too palpable, too present. The photo shocked the West, and it was everywhere for a hot minute, shaming people into sending new waves of donations to NGOs working in hunger-afflicted Africa. 

*at the time incorrectly identified as a girl, thus the name of the photo - The Vulture and the Little Girl

There was also an outcry - how could the photographer take this picture of the dying child? How heartless could you be? The photo originally appeared in The New York Times, and a week after it ran the paper updated saying that the child had survived, and had made it to an aid station. Sadly the boy died in 2007.

But the photo, and the implied ethical weirdness behind it, haunted people. 

It haunted Kevin Carter. Four months after winning the Pulitzer he killed himself. Two members of the Bang Bang Club still survive; one of them lost his legs stepping on a landmine. 

Kevin Carter haunts Civil War, Alex Garland’s grand and masterful film about war and what it means. The film itself features a bit of a Bang Bang Club - there’s Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), a war photog who is hard as steel but deeply wounded; there’s Joel (Wagner Moura), an adrenaline junkie reporter who lives hard every say he has; Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) is the aged reporter, the grand old figure who dispenses the usually unheard wisdom of caution; and then there’s Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) the baby-faced newbie desperate to get started in war photography. And she’s in luck - the movie opens a year and a half into a new American Civil War, which seems to be drawing to some kind of an end. 

This quartet ride together from New York City to Washington DC, where the fighting rages, and because the highways are vaporized they take the long way and come across tableau after tableau of bloodthirsty, angry America tearing itself to pieces. They are far from the front lines, and that means the people they run into are perhaps fringe fighters. The battle lines are not clear, and even within the movie it’s not really clear what the beef is between the factions. There’s the United States, run by a third term Trumpian fascist, there’s the in-our-timeline-unlikely coalition of California and Texas in the Western Forces and then there’s just Florida, kind of doing its own thing. But again, it’s not really clear what anyone feels about anything (although Garland leaves plenty of clues and tidbits that an engaged viewer can use for strong worldbuilding and to get a better sense of what’s going on). And that is the point - in a war like this, a convulsive and internecine bloodbath it doesn’t matter what the ideologies are once the bullets start flying. Nobody’s talking it out anymore; it doesn’t matter who has a better argument or who is in the right - it’s all about might at that point. You’re not fighting for a cause anymore, you’re fighting to stay alive. 

This is what interests Garland. This is how modern civil wars work; it’s not really like the old days of two armies standing against each other. It’s about partisans and networked cells; it’s about auto mechanics turned guerilla fighters and it’s about people exchanging fire simply because they’re being fired upon. 

Some people have a hard time with this, which is weird to me, as the movie is very, very explicit in what it’s doing. I’m going to talk about two scenes in particular and while I will be as general as possible and avoid as many spoilers as I can, if you want to remain utterly unspoiled jump ahead five paragraphs. 

One scene involves the press in their van coming upon a sniper battle. They hunker down with a sniper who is in a uniform but has dye in his hair and paint on his nails. They ask which side he’s on, but there’s no real answer here because, as he says, what’s happening here is that there’s a guy inside a house trying to shoot him and he’s trying to shoot that guy. That’s the whole war, that’s it, all summed up. Who am I fighting? That guy. Why? Because he’s shooting at me. Simple as that. 

The other scene is one of my favorites in the film; the press van stops at a rural gas station for a fill-up and discover that the local yokels, all toting assault rifles and in hunting gear, have beaten and strung up a couple of looters. The reporters go check it out, and find two people strung up, battered and bloody but still alive. 

“I went to high school with that guy,” one of the yokels said. “He didn’t talk to me much.”

This (paraphrased) line is brillant. This is the heart of what a civil war is - it’s not an ideological battle, it’s about settling scores, it’s about showing folks who’s boss. Yeah, in the rooms where the generals meet it’s about strategy and there are considerations of future policy, but in the mud and the blood it’s about settling scores and acting out. You weren’t nice to me in high school? Guess who has the assault rifle now. Maybe you should have invited me to your lunch table when you had the chance. 

Okay we’re getting out of spoiler territory here. 

This stuff works because, while it’s pretty obvious thematic material, Garland is directing at a level he has never achieved before and creates an almost nightmarish level of tension and intensity around these scenes. I’m an avowed Garland Guy, and even still I didn’t quite know what he had in store for me here. I knew he had this intensity in his writing, and his other films have been good, but perhaps because Civil War is the least fantastical and least genre of his movies, with the least galaxy-brained ideas in it the director is really able to strip it all down. This is an episodic movie, with the ersatz Bang Bang Club stumbling into one situation after another, and this pearls-on-a-string structure keeps you pulled along. Garland soothes us, then he builds the tension, then he fucks with us before finally exploding the tension into an ear-blasting cacophony of sudden and terrifying violence, then everyone decompresses and Garland soothes us. And then he builds the tension… the rhythm is impeccable, and it is propulsive. 

Along the way he gives us a few setpieces for the ages, including a scene with Jesse Plemmons that will likely become the hallmark of the film. I won’t discuss the sequence in any depth, but I will say that Plemmons continues his streak of parachuting into movies and making them about thirty times better with a short appearance. I have seen folks talking about what he does that is so good, trying to parse just what he brings to these roles, and here’s my take: he leaves space. He doesn’t come to us. He makes us come to him. He plays these roles with not a blankness but a reserve, and with a sense that maybe anything could happen next. There’s a capability for surprise in his every action, and while it can (and often is) in some way threatening it’s also something that works for him in comedies - you just don’t know what he’s going to say next. He’s never, ever telegraphing what’s going on inside of him. And so you lean in, trying to decode him, trying to anticipate him, and then he comes at you with something absolutely unexpected, or expected yet in a way you couldn’t have seen coming. This performance - maybe less than eight minutes of screen time, if even that much? - is a beautiful example of this technique, and of what Plemmons does so well. 

By the way, this movie is stacked with terrific performances, including by actors who come and go out of scenes. I want to talk about two in particular, which should not be read as a slight to anyone I’m not pulling out. 

First it’s Kirsten Dunst, who embodies Lee in such a real, lived in way here that you never question her reality. Dunst is world-weary and all too aware of the danger in her line of work, and she wants to make sure new kid Jessie is safe… but at the same time she doesn’t want to get emotionally involved. She’s turmoil on the inside, turmoil that even those closest to her don’t see because to get the job done, to get the shot that defines the story, she needs to put that all away. She needs to pack it down tight. She needs to do this because she believes it matters, but to do this she has to destroy a piece of her soul, day after day. Dunst is remarkable. 

Then there’s Cailee Spaeny, who is clearly the next enormous superstar. She’s so obviously someone who will be at the Oscars again and again in the future, whose presence in the crowd will be a given. She’s incredible here; the role of Jessie is a tough one, because she needs to be vulnerable and green but she also needs to be believable in her tenacity. Spaeny also has the added burden of looking about fifteen (the character and the actor are both in their 20s) and so seeing Jessie in some of these tense, dangerous situations evokes a deeper sense of fear for us. But that babyface also lends so much weight to the transformative journey Spaeny goes on; by the end of the movie she’s all but a different person and it’s fluid and natural and powerful. What a performance.

There’s a big set piece at the end that is pretty spectacular, especially at the film’s budget level. After spending most of the film on the road with ragtag forces fighting we end up in DC where the planes and the tanks and the soldiers are, and while Garland gives us scope in this sequence what he does best is creating an incredible emotional throughline that drags us to the end. He all but grabs us by the throat and takes us to the final scene, and the last ten minutes of this movie are an exceptional mix of dread, horror, excitement, sadness and maybe… just maybe?... a little bit of relief. 

One of the things that’s most striking, and that makes the ending of the movie so layered, is that Civil War feels like a movie that is showing images of a possible immediate future. Again, it’s not about the ideologies or the moralities of an America divided, it’s about the reality of it - the way that life kind of goes on even as neighborhoods are bombed out shells, how people still go to work in some parts of the country while attack helicopters descend on the White House. It’s a familiar feeling, a post-2020 feeling of being keenly aware that a cataclysmic historical event doesn’t interrupt as much of your life as you might have thought; you still have to cook food and do laundry, you still need to get up in the morning and shower. Garland captures the surreal normalcy that descends in these moments, the strange understanding that no matter how disorienting current events may be, life must still go on. That’s the real horror - people are being bulldozed into mass graves and you still have to go to work. Hell, that’s what’s happening right now, but Garland smartly takes that stuff and brings it here. Usually we see these images at a comfortable remove; the shop signs in the background are a different language, the cars don’t look quite like what we drive. We know it’s real but it feels far away, on the TV. Here he brings it home, brings the death and chaos to familiar street corners and cliched American towns. He refuses to give us distance. 

This is what the war photographer does. The Vulture and the Little Girl does that, which is one of the reasons it caused controversy - it feels like we are the ones looking at the folded over child menaced by the metaphor for death. It cut through the noise and the distance and placed us there, which is why people reacted so strongly. I also suspect it’s why people are reacting strongly to Civil War; the folks who talk about how it’s a political cop out are perhaps being confronted with the fact that all of their correct opinions and carefully vetted positions are actually meaningless when it gets to this point, when it gets to the point where the guns are out and the tanks are rolling. When it gets to that point all of your beliefs about human rights or immigration or how to read the Constitution are simply a fancier way of saying “I knew that guy in high school. He didn’t talk to me much.” When the shooting starts the theory ends, and it’s like it’s been from the first battlefield - you gotta kill this guy or he’s going to kill you. That’s the depth of the politics. And this is what Garland wants us to see, the war photo he’s trying to shove in our faces - once we cross this line, a line we all fear looms so near, the reasons we crossed that line no longer matter. What matters is that this guy is trying to shoot me, and I’m trying to shoot him.