Alex Garland’s Civil War is about the Ethics of War Journalism

If there’s one thing you should take from Alex Garland’s Civil War, it’s that Jesse Plemens can Act. Yes, that Act with a capital A. He’s only onscreen for, what, three to five minutes, in one eerie and tense sequence well into the second act of the film, but in those few minutes he seems to embody the figure of Evil (with a capital E), capricious and awful and acting according to his own, inscrutable, motives.

The pity is that’s basically all you can take from this film. That’s because it has narrative problems, problems the the text of the film tries to brush under a rub, but which are so great that they sort of resemble a mound in the middle of a dining room.

The main issue is that the ending is boring. That ending involves a separatist movement driving a tank onto the white house lawn, so boring being the audience’s response is pretty bad. On paper it sounds thrilling, exciting, just what a summer blockbuster requires. But, you see, when a separatist movement drives a tank onto the White House lawn, nobody in the audience knows what it means. That’s because there’s nobody on screen who knows what it means, how it feels, or how to contextualise it. That’s because nobody onscreen has taken any editorial stance on the biggest part of this film: that America has fallen into a civil war—the sitting President a refuses to cede power at the end of their second term, and so starts a third term—and several groups have seceded from the USA, and now fight for Washington.

All this is another way of saying that this film has Act 1 one problems: it has issues of exposition, and issues of characterisation related to that exposition, and instead of facing those problems head on, it asks the audience to completely suspend disbelief and just go with it.

Kirsten Dust plays war photographer Lee Miller, and along with her is Wagner Moura as Joel, a Reuters journalist from Florida and Lee’s colleague, Cailee Spaeny as Jessie Cullen, an aspiring young photographer from Missouri who accompanies Lee and Joel on their journey, Stephen McKinley Henderson as Sammy, a veteran journalist for The New York Times and Lee’s mentor. Miller and Joel are headed from New York to D.C. to interview the President before the inevitable military defeat. So the plucky band of Journalists head off into the woods of a crumbling Eastern Seaboard. There isn’t really much plot once the quartet have left New York, instead we have a series of set pieces on man’s inhumanity to man. They are obviously well researched and totally plausible. But they lack any thematic heft beyond This is Like Bad, Man. How can people do this each other? To which the text never really offers any answer.

Just…at no point are the journalists ever confronted with their part in this breakdown. Nor do we ever get any sense of the President, his third term, or what he, or his supporters, believe. Nor do we get any sense of what any of the secessionist groups believe. What’s the operative difference between the Florida Alliance and the Western Front? What of the Portland Maoists? We’re never told. We are instead served with some weasel words about the role of journalists in society—they go and show us how it was, so that we, back home, can ask the hard questions—and then off they go into an active war zone, trying to get the last interview with a doomed President.

It feels like when somebody definitely has something on their mind, like they are in unrequited love, but can’t even begin to admit to themselves that that’s what’s happening. The subtext pushes itself out, makes itself heard in it’s absence. The questions the film wants us to ponder are really answered by the film itself, instead what’s really going on is pushed to the background, and we have to infer it ourselves.

And the film suffers for it. You see, you can’t thrust a protagonist off into the world, without first explaining to the audience what that world is, and what it means to venture out. Act 1 is the most important act, but in this film it’s over quickly. We’re just introduced to our characters, what they want to do, and then they set off.

Because the writer is interested in other questions–like what exactly are the Ethics of War Journalism, what does it take to document war—they never bother to explain any of this to the audience, and then the audience is just left bored at the climax.

You can’t brush the exposition, and your character’s take on the world, under the rug. You actually have to answer those questions.

Look, I get it. I know why those questions are left unanswered: this is a tentpole summer blockbuster, and it cannot fail. Otherwise, the studio would be out of money and they wouldn’t release any more films. The film cost so much that they can’t afford, literally can’t afford, to offend the sensibilities of any segment of the audience. It’s just that—come on!—the audience is going to have questions, and you as an artist, actually have to take a side. Have an editorial stance. We all know who would refuse to cede an election. Just say it.