On Alex Garland's Civil War

A Missed Opportunity to Warn America About The Consequences of Political Polarization

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Somehow, I made it to an all-time personal record, working 30 days straight without a single day off.

Now, there were days in that month where I only worked 2-3 hours, but the majority were somewhere between 7-14. It was a sliding scale. I don’t look at hours when I’m working, I look at “did I make enough today that I feel OK with stopping,” which is an extremely variable kind of thing in a job like food delivery. (If you’ve missed my last few posts on my adventures in Door Dashing and Uber Eats-ing, you can see them here, here, and here.)

Anyway, the long and short of it is, it’s apparently not good for you to work that much, even if you need to, and when I finally stopped to attend my daughter’s high school graduation this past weekend, my immune system sensed the loss of momentum and said, “Now is probably a good time to get really sick.”

Allow me a moment to say: I’m so proud of my Sophie, who graduated from an exceptionally demanding prep school, with honors, while participating in three different high-level choirs and starring in multiple plays and maintaining an active social life. She has proven that there’s nothing she can’t accomplish — and she made it look easy!

So, what started as a tickle in the throat Sunday morning turned into a full blown body-aches-like-I-got-thrown-down-the-stairs with fever and cough flu by Sunday night. I was out for a couple of hours on Memorial day doing an errand and some shopping for our dinner, and it took everything I had in me to just finish and get home. I spent the rest of the day on the couch, watching movies, trying to ignore the fact that I felt like week-old re-heated hot garbage. I thought I had picked up COVID again, since that was the last time I felt this bad, but I tested negative, so it must be some other super-fun variety of virus. I’m feeling a bit less awful today, so here I am, doing stream-of-consciousness movie reviewing with plenty of side tangents.

Where was I? Oh yes, movies. Ha!

The first movie I watched was The Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare, which was a good-old-fashioned wartime Nazi-killing adventure flick that reminded me of the original Indiana Jones trilogy. It had a great cast, was well-written and performed, and was just a solid movie experience like I remember having as a kid. Not a woke moment in the entire film. If you’re not familiar with it, and you like this kind of film, I highly recommend it:

I followed this with Alex Garland’s dystopian near-future American cautionary tale, Civil War. Again, if you’re not familiar, here is the trailer:

I’ve been cautiously interested in this movie since I first saw a trailer for it last year. It had the potential to be a wake-up call for an increasingly polarized nation, and I wanted to see how that would be handled. Admittedly, I was worried that it was going to be a Leftist political LARP, inasmuch as Nick Offerman as the tendentious President of the United States comes across in the trailer like a thinly-veiled effigy for Trump. “They shoot journalists on sight in the capital,” Stephen McKinley Henderson’s character Sammy warns. “They literally see us as enemy combatants.”

Trump, of course, has said very similar things, such as, “The press…are truly the ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE!” No big stretch to connect these themes.

They also mention that the President is “on his third term,” which is another Leftist paranoia talking point about Trump — that he will usurp the rule of law if he is re-elected and never let go of power.

But Offerman’s POTUS gets precious little screen time, his character serving almost entirely as a paper tiger, a McGuffin to drive the plot forward, the main characters showing themselves willing to brave extreme danger just to interview and photograph him despite his hostility towards journalists.

“DC is falling,” Joe, the male lead played by Wagner Moura, says. “And the President is dead inside of a month. Interviewing him is the only story left.” 

Despite these cues, the movie is surprisingly apolitical, giving little no real backstory about how the conflict began, or even who the two sides really are or what they’re fighting about. We’re given the names of just two states (California, Texas) who are on the side of the seceding “Western Forces,” but despite battles taking place in New York, West Virginia, and Virginia, and mentions of folks trying to “pretend it isn’t happening” in Missouri and Colorado, we never get a concrete explanation of where the other 47 states stand in the conflict.

Instead, the movie focuses on the lives of three journalists in this mid-Civil War America, all of who work for legacy media. Along the way, they pick up a young aspiring photojournalist who wants to follow in their footsteps. It shows both the dangers they face, and the armor of cynicism they must wear in order to do the job.

When Jesse, the 23-year-old-who-looks-16 neophyte who considers Kirsten Dunst’s Lee, a famous photojournalist, her hero, is confronted with a situation where some good old boys guarding a gas station have two prisoners hung up and beaten nearly to death, she freezes in disgust and horror.

Later, she beats herself up for not doing anything in the situation, and she gets a full dose of Lee’s jaded allergy to human empathy:

Jesse: I didn't take a photo. I didn't take a single photo. I didn't even remember a camera's on me. Like, oh, my God, like why didn't I just tell him not to shoot them?

Joe: They're probably gonna kill them anyway.

Jesse: How do you know?

Lee: He doesn't know, but that's besides the point. Once you start asking yourself those questions, you can't stop. So we don't ask. We record, so other people ask. Wanna be a journalist? That's the job.

Dunst, who is 42 but looks at least 50 throughout the movie, wears the facial expression in the photo above (someone described it as “resting midlife face”) for almost the entire 1 hour and 49 minute run time. She does a great job of selling a world-weary character who has seen too much shit to care but cannot stop pursuing the next photo. Lee is not a likable character, but she makes sense, and Dunst does more with her performance than most actresses could. For those, like me, who remember her most as the always-smiling and effervescent Mary Jane from Sam Raimi’s Spiderman trilogy, it’s a huge departure.

Inasmuch as my expectations of this movie as a warning about what might happen if Trump returns to power (and what kind of people might support him) were so diluted as to be almost an aside, I found myself wondering what the point was of making such a film at all.

What Civil War somehow manages not to be is a bracing reminder to an ideologically irreconcilable populace that this is what the country might look like if we allow our differences to continue to grow more rancorous.

To my mind, this isn’t just a missed opportunity, but a purposeful omission that I have no plausible explanation for. The war itself is just the setting, not the focus.

Instead, the film is dedicated entirely to telling the story of the dangerous, thankless, dehumanizing, and at times utterly reckless job of photojournalists, covering a war that they seem disinteresting in taking any side on, any more than they would if they were documenting a foreign conflict. The closest we get to a reflective moment is when Dunst’s Lee says, “Every time I survived a war zone, and got the photo, I thought I was sending a warning home. ‘Don't do this.’ But here we are.”

There’s something fatalistic, and perhaps even nihilistic in Garland’s choices in this film.

I should note briefly that I already have a bone to pick with Garland. In all the hours I’ve been logging driving around Phoenix, I’ve been listening to Jeff VanderMeer’s excellent Southern Reach Trilogy, which was the source material for Garland’s film Annihilation. That movie was both beautiful and thought-provoking, and as such, was fine as a standalone project, but it was so utterly different from the story in the books as to barely even be related. It’s left me wanting for an authentic adaptation, because I think the story would work so well as a series, even moreso than a standalone film.

I don’t know if Garland’s vision for his filmmaking, which is visually rich but seems to come at the expense of excellent storytelling, is the problem here. It’s hard to say what, if anything, he was trying to say.

As much as America needs a wake-up call about the way her current political polarization is trending, this film was the perfect opportunity, and it utterly missed the mark. There is no takeaway from Civil War that I could state with any confidence. Even the heroes of the film are left, in the end, to look like selfish careerists in pursuit of the perfect quote, the perfect photo, at the expense of their own integrity — and the wellbeing of their friends. Jesse’s evolution from frightened, hero-worshiping aspirant to get-the-shot-at-any-cost photographer left a particularly bad taste in my mouth. Hers was the opposite of a redemptive character arc.

Maybe that was the point: that political battles ruin us all in the end.

But I can’t help feeling like I’m trying to imbue a meaning that simply isn’t there.