Will Sorg-

If you haven’t been paying attention, America is in a very tense place politically. I don’t feel the need to elaborate on this beyond mentioning that we’re only a few years removed from a genuine attempted coup on the capital. British filmmaker Alex Garland’s newest movie has garnered a lot of attention and controversy due to its portrayal of a modern civil war for control over the United States of America. Civil War follows a group of war journalists on an odyssey through the war-torn Eastern U.S. with their ultimate destination being a soon-to-be-invaded Washington D.C.

The film keeps the actual details of the conflict vague. Florida and a few other states have seemingly declared independence from the USA while Texas and California have joined into a coalition to destroy the current U.S. government. The president is definitively controlling the U.S. as a fascist dictatorship with his rule being compared to Gaddafi and Mussolini. However, all of this is essentially irrelevant in the grand scheme of the movie. The film has drawn criticism for this deliberate sidelining of the specific politics of the war, however, the obfuscation of Civil War’s politics is very much the goal.

Not only does this make the movie age better when we hopefully move past this period of political instability, but it also furthers the actual goals of this movie. Civil War is not really about Democrats, Republicans, Donald Trump, or whatever current culture war is currently blowing up on social media. It’s about inaction and how it is killing America. If you need proof of this, look no further than the main characters of the story.

The two core characters of the film are Lee and Jessie. Lee is a photojournalist who has been documenting wars for decades. Played by the wonderful Kirsten Dunst, Lee is a callous and disillusioned woman who almost exclusively sees the war through a potential for career success. Jessie meanwhile is the young optimistic amateur photographer hoping to become as well-regarded as Lee. Cailee Spaeny’s performance as Jessie is almost the perfect opposite to Dunst’s Lee as she is deeply affected by the atrocities shown in the film. However what’s most interesting about these two is not their starting characterizations, but where they end up.

We watch as Lee slowly begins to experience a crisis of faith in not only her worldview but her entire life. She slowly gets eaten up by all that she’s done. The warzones she’s been to, the people she’s photographed as they slowly died in front of her. It’s shown by the intense blurring around her head each time the camera focuses on her, she’s unraveling and it’s happening fast. Meanwhile, Jessie slowly begins to realize that if you want to be a famous war photographer a part of you needs to die; That part being your humanity.

Without spoiling everything this movie is visceral and incredibly anxiety-inducing. Not only because of the rough, almost too real subject matter but also because our main characters all respond to it in different ways. There is a constant refrain by the journalist characters that they’re not intervening or taking a deliberate stance for any particular side because they need to accurately document what is going on; for the people who won’t acknowledge that this war is as bad as it is. However, it is shown constantly that our key characters are adrenaline junkies who use their work as war journalists to distract from their own issues and so they can’t fully come to grips with the war themselves. After all, if you’re constantly on the move, weaving through gunfire and drinking yourself to sleep there’s not much time left to deal with the atrocities happening in war. Compartmentalization and the ethics of war journalism are at the forefront of this film. We see our protagonists witness unspeakable things. Several times prisoners of war and civilians are gunned down and it is heavily implied that unless those actions are done by the fascist side of the war our main characters will probably not tell anyone about what they saw.

Just technically this film is a journey into the heart of darkness. The sound design is immaculate, the guns sound terrifyingly real, and in every scene there’s a palpable texture to the audio. It sounds like a warzone, the tension of a too-quiet street, the rubble crunched underneath people’s feet, the tires squealing with the sense of an urgent animal. We are reduced to a more primal state within the film and we feel it in our ears. Visually too this is a deeply arresting movie. Of course, it plays with familiar anxieties showing DC as an active warzone or New York being bombed, but the countryside is a constantly dangerous place in the film. Visually the greens and browns of the rural eastern U.S. are deeply unnerving. Bombed-out buildings and hidden soldiers are around every corner and there’s never the sense of security that is given to our protagonists when they are officially escorted by soldiers.

This is a careful movie. It’s careful to never portray any of the military forces as “the good guys.” In fact part of the terror of this movie is that beyond maybe the final act, you never know who belongs to what side. Everyone is in camo, everyone is American, and everyone is shooting at someone else. You always feel nervous when there are soldiers and you can never know if the group of journalists are in danger or not. Along with this you slowly come to realize that there’s really hardly anyone to root for in the movie. Our protagonists are all exploiting people’s suffering for profit with no real belief in the system beyond career gain. They follow soldiers into battle with cameras rather than guns. After showing how these pursuits lead to nothing but confusion, exploitation, and death the film seems to be asking a question: are cameras and guns all that different?