by Movie Review: Civil War Attempts to Navigate Modern America’s Increasing Polarization But Misses What’s Causing It
A24’s new film Civil War has a simple message: War is war. It’s a statement that says nothing about the underlying causes of violence and polarization, but this is also why the film finds it so easy to stop there.
Four characters, who are all journalists, must travel 847 miles to D.C. from New York. They want an interview with the President of the United States before he’s surrounded and killed by the secessionist “Western Forces” of Texas and California. This is part of the film’s comical alternative history premise. Along the way, the characters navigate a tumultuous civil war and the people who are caught in the middle of it.
The film adopts a classic American road trip structure with uneven success. It wants to capture the anxiety of a divided America with a series of frontier vignettes without having all that much to say about them. From place to place, what lessons are there to be learned? Kirsten Dunst’s photojournalist character at one point says: “Once you start asking those questions you can’t stop. So we don’t ask. We record so other people ask.” This is supposed to be the film’s mission statement on the power of journalism, but by avoiding the civil war’s underlying political conditions, what’s recorded by the camera begins to seem suspect.
Images of burning forests, abandoned roads, destroyed monuments and mass graves in the film are meant to represent the contrasts of a brutal civil war on the American landscape.
Of course, that’s also the point. An alliance between the country’s largest Republican and Democratic Party safe states against the U.S. government is detached from reality. At times it seems as if the film’s director, Alex Garland, has intentionally gone out of his way to avoid politics altogether.
This is likely part of an effort to broaden its potential audience and financial appeal. The film makes it difficult to cohere any meaningful reference to current events except a vague warning about the consequences of a house divided against itself. Media coverage of the film has been just as incoherent, but the basic narrative is familiar enough – the Biden administration has also made increasing polarization and attacks on democracy a core part of its campaign message for the 2024 presidential election. Alex Garland has doubled down on that message, consulting a Democratic Party strategist for the film and claiming that “the function of the left in a situation like this is, hands down, flat out, to win an election.”
Images of burning forests, abandoned roads, destroyed monuments and mass graves in the film are meant to represent the contrasts of a brutal civil war on the American landscape. The film is interested in the force of these images. Violence is regularly broken up by the photos characters take of it, allowing certain moments to linger with the audience before returning to the scene. Dead bodies tell their own story, or so we’re told.
Despite the film’s implicit avoidance of politics, this is where its actual political positions shine through most. Depicting the horrors of war is supposed to show its senselessness, treating radical political ideologies as part of that senselessness. When Wagner Moura’s journalist character asks a sniper what side he’s fighting on, he’s met with a blunt response: “Someone’s trying to kill us, we are trying to kill them.” The purpose of this exchange is to point out how all violence and war look the same, but that’s also what makes the film so blind. There’s a lot more to know about violence beyond the frame, and this is covered up in the interest of making the left and right seem indistinguishable.
Clearly, though, they are not. An insurrectionary far right has taken center stage and placed its bets on another Trump presidential term. The MAGA movement is a threat that also stands in reaction to the potential for left uprisings and the search for an alternative course to capitalism. Meanwhile, we’re seeing a new Cold War emerge with political repression at home and escalating political tensions abroad. The Biden administration and its liberal supporters have failed to seriously challenge the far right; Civil War’s passive narrative relies on the idea that this means nothing else can either. All that’s left is to solemnly record the aftermath.
Alex Garland said in a New York Times interview that “this film is about checks and balances: polarization, division, the way populist politics leads toward extremism, where extremism itself will end up and where the press is in all of that.” He’s concerned about the collapse of the political center. Unfortunately, aside from some beautiful and evocative aesthetic choices, the film gets its audience no closer to understanding what that concern really means or what should be done about it. If good journalism is about the things you notice, then Civil War is too caught up in its own equivocations to get past the obvious – we are moving towards increased conflict between the far right and the far left, and that can’t last forever.
Judith Chavarria
Judith Chavarria (they/she) is a Steering Committee member of DSA’s Reform & Revolution caucus. She is a member of Centre County DSA and of DSA’s Democracy Commission.
