There is no tangible element that classifies “Civil War” in the genre of science fiction, and yet there is no distance from Alex Garland’s previous films, such as “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation”. It’s a horrifying realization that what we’re watching is both a dystopian nightmare and an all-too-real situation that could literally unfold tomorrow, making this film an excruciating experience.
On the first level, we follow a road-trip of a group of four war correspondents, the composition of which also has its significance within Garland’s multi-layered work – along with the two leading correspondents is a legendary, but age-incapacitated, to carry out the mission journalist and a young lady in her first attempt to practice the profession. On their way to Washington we witness an America ruined and abandoned.
We see how the correspondents’ work brings them up against the limits of human endurance and how they are driven to a cruelty for self-protection. This is primarily expressed through Lee, played by a stunning Kirsten Dunst, who embodies the duality of inhumane detachment and the oceans of thought and emotion behind her face, acting as a mentor to Jessie as she embarks on her own journey of self-defense discovery.
The scripted premise of the film has the will to analyze the extreme division that one encounters not only in America but in the whole world as expressed in the last decade in the country’s political system. Garland pulls off two great writing feats: the first is to never mention any specific date, with the sense that anything could be happening right now outweighs such a need.
The second is that throughout the film no one takes a stand on who is right and who is wrong. We never learn the reasons for the secession of the states, we have no clue as to who is behind it, no names are ever mentioned. There are only two opposing armies, and Garland’s narrative is so tightly structured, you forget to question yourself.
Garland’s Civil War
Too often you don’t even distinguish which camp the soldiers on the screen belong to and you simply witness abhorrent and horrifying behavior, a reality that no side in any war ever admits, that the official purpose of a war is different from the real one, giving rise to man a violence without retribution. The film’s most disturbing scenes manage to be the ones in which the correspondents encounter civilians, and the point for Garland is to show the characters’ reactions to what they witness.
They themselves don’t take any kind of supportive position between the two warring sides, but Garland uses them to suggest the moral side of the profession, with the pictures they take with their cameras both an endless nightmare and every journalist’s dream to have in his hands, which taking it a step further also concerns us as consumers of this kind of raw graphicness.
The film doesn’t let the content speak for itself and Garland directs thrilling scenes whether they involve dialogue or one of the best depictions of military operations we’ve seen on screen. The excellent sound design work makes it an active element of the narrative, as it puts us inside the action where every perception of life is a mortal danger, while the cinematography of the finale is enough to make Garland a recipient of major awards.
Director-Screenplay: Alex Garland
Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Sonoya Mizuno, Nick Offerman, Jesse Plemons
In collaboration with filmy
