'Civil War' Delivers an Intense and Difficult Experience [Review]

​As the closing credits for writer/director Alex Garland’s Civil War rolled, I found myself feeling numb. Odd, I thought. I should feel something, shouldn’t I? It wasn’t until I got to my car that I broke down and began to cry. Turns out, I was in shock from the intense experience I had just been through. What the filmmaker had shown me was a mere taste of the pointless brutality of war. The horror of it. The inhumanity of it. And the worst part? It felt like something I could wake up and see in my own backyard tomorrow. Garland’s film had achieved what it wanted; it shook me.
 
Set in a near future that feels all too close to now, we find the United States near the end of a civil war, brought into reality by a fascist president (Nick Offerman). The Western Forces are just days away from rolling into his fortress in D.C. and ending the conflict. But before they do, hardened photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and her colleague, Joel (Wagner Moura), want to interview the President, aware that any member of the media who gets close to him is shot on sight. With Lee’s mentor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and rookie journalist, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), tagging along, the four set out on a road trip across the U.S., into the heart of battle zones, intent on getting the story no matter what.
 
Rather than drop us into the war through the eyes of soldiers fighting for one side or the other, Garland ignores politics altogether and centers this story on a small group of journalists, because they are the observers who must relinquish bias to do their job. Their purpose is to show us the death and destruction, leaving it for us to decide where we fall. New to the field, Jessie faces this reality again and again, horrified by the things she sees but accepting that her role is to get the shot so that the rest of us can see it, too. Through the lenses of Lee and Jessie’s cameras, Garland presents imagery depicting pain, horror, death. Right and left. Red and blue. Republican and Democrat. None of these things are mentioned. We’re not supposed to see photos of piles of bodies and feel political bias. They don’t tell us to. Instead, they tell us, here are people. Here is death. Here is an act of atrocity committed in the name of war. A tribute to the days of unbiased journalism and an appreciation for the people that risk their lives to bring these stories to us, Civil War does the same. It doesn’t tell us what to feel. It challenges us to contemplate being on a battlefield with someone pointing a gun at you, when political affiliation no longer means a damn thing. One scene sees our journalists asking a pair of soldiers why they are facing off against a sniper, to which one replies, they’re shooting at us. All that matters on the front line is survival.

To hammer home the ugly pointlessness of war, Garland bombards the audience with pulse-pounding battle scenes and horrific violence that left me shellshocked. We’re with Jessie as she is pushed and pulled by soldiers through a warzone. Bullets ripping past our ears. Bombs exploding all around us. Air filled with the dust of buildings pulverized into the ground. I could hardly breathe, the chaos of the battles in Civil War is suffocating. Understand that this film is supposed to upset you. To enrage you. To devastate you. It is unflinching in its depiction of human cruelty. Bodies are blown to pieces. Riddled with bullets. Gallons of blood spilled in the streets. Nightmarish doesn’t begin to describe some of what Garland forces us to witness. All while critiquing those who would sooner look away and pretend it doesn’t exist. How dare you feel that sort of privilege while human beings are slaughtered all around you, it asks. Our protagonists, the real-life people they represent, they put their lives on the line so we can see what’s happening around the world. The very least we can do is acknowledge it.
 
Some have questioned why make this film. I get it. No one wants to be reminded of how close we are to this fiction becoming a reality. But the point is that we can’t ignore it. This is where we are, where we could be going, and Garland’s Civil War exists as a stark warning to not look away now. As if to remind us of what’s at stake, the film sprinkles a surprising humor all throughout the chaos and bloodshed. Some of that works as a much-needed relief of tension, but it’s also used to emphasize that our journalists and many of those whom they encounter are human beings. Part of the horror of the film is watching as Jessie’s own humanity becomes more calloused to the atrocities, while decades of imagery she can’t forget begins to eat away at Lee. Just part of what’s at stake for war photographers. More than anything, Civil War asks us to recognize what good journalists sacrifice to bring us unbiased stories that encourage us to take the conversation from there. In a time when journalists are under constant attack all around the world, this film couldn’t feel more urgent.  
 
With a plot that hardly gets into the conflict or why it’s happening, Civil War may seem simple on the surface, but it’s an emotionally complex confrontation of our humanity or lack thereof. Some audiences will want Garland to take a more defined stance on one side or the other of the political spectrum. That isn’t the point here. Through gripping performances, anxiety-riddled battles and brutal violence, this film is a tribute to the people who risk their lives to inform us, as well as a glimpse of the brink we’ve found ourselves standing on that begs us to not take that leap into absolute Hell. Civil War isn’t just Alex Garland’s most affecting work…it’s one of the most important films you’ll see all year.

Civil War arrives in theaters April 12th from A24. 

By Matt Konopka