“Civil War”: Action Flick or Wake-Up Call?

Source: 2moons AI

The critics’ reviews are now in, and their opinion is that the new film Civil War is a must-watch (Sampurna, 2024).

The Movie as an Incomplete Jigsaw Puzzle

What can happen when an extraordinarily power-hungry president succeeds in “canceling” the United States by militarizing the police, disbanding the FBI, and calling for nationwide air strikes—all to remain in office to serve an unconstitutional third term? This movie, constituting a genre of its own—and without naming names, or even political parties—unblinkingly ventures into this hellish milieu.

Yet, curiously, the Englishman Alex Garland—director of Ex Machina, Annihilation, Men, among other provocative science-fiction thrillers—is perhaps the purist of filmmakers. He calculatingly omits any discussion of ideology, whether from the movie’s central characters or his own.

Instead, he leaves it to the viewer to fill in the blanks. And the movie is chock full of blanks, though when limitless firearms repeatedly go off, there’s no doubt that they’re altogether capable of indiscriminately killing people—including innocent civilians.

The movie hardly appears to aspire to be prophetic. Rather, it’s strangely abstract and theoretical. In this tense, action-filled thriller, we watch in horror as individual human life seems to lose all import. Yet, isn’t that what inevitably happens when life becomes objectified and the focus isn’t felt by its fighters to be about advancing principles but solely winning?

Unbiased Journalism: “Virtuous” in Exposing the Bleakest Possible Reality

The plot, maybe because it keeps its multiple secrets intact, is sketchingly simple: We witness the events of this chaotic, war-torn America through the eyes and ears of four committed journalists. Two are photographers, Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and Jessie (Cailee Spaen of Priscilla); and two are reporters/political journalists, Joel (Wagner Moura) and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson).

We follow them as they follow explosive events in New York City, en route to the Capitol, hoping to interview the duplicitous, but unnamed, usurping president (Nick Offerman).

In this apocalyptic universe, arch-ideological antagonists, Texas and California, having seceded from the (dis-)union, join forces against a terrifying, self-destructive government. Still, these documentors of history in the making all too often find it impossible to be certain about who the patriots and rebels (two factions of) really are—particularly as the different sides are outfitted, ironically, with the same U.S. army fatigues.

And this planned confusion would seem to reflect Garland’s central point: War, from civil to international, ultimately blurs necessary moral distinctions. For it all comes down to one’s viewpoint. And that’s far more prejudicial than scientifically accurate.

As one critic aptly remarks, the movie dramatizes "the futility of 'sides.' Garland’s the last person to suggest a group hug [as in, kumbaya]. As statements go, his powerful vision leaves us shaken, effectively repeating the question that quelled the L.A. riots: Can we all get along?" (Debruge, 2024).

The Psychological Characterization Befitting Ambiguity

All four journalists in the movie have a job to do, and the less they contemplate about what they’re doing the better they can capture the specifics of the war’s shocking reality. Early reviewers have suggested that this, collectively, represents their moral failing. But if they’re truly dedicated to their craft, aren’t they scrupulously doing precisely what’s expected of them?

Disinterestedly reporting what they observe is their journalistic duty, not speculating, evaluating, or editorializing on its meaning. In fact, that’s what reporters are paid for: to employ whatever means are at their disposal to obtain information for their audiences. There’s an inner-and-outer risk-filled daring in all this, and in interviews, Garland has referred to these characters as “heroes.”

Doubtless, the crew is emotionally detached from their work, and they seem implicitly to grasp that it’s a prerequisite for professional cogency. True, to concentrate wholly on what’s external to their personal values might seem almost inhuman. But this is an essential dimension of Garland’s consciousness about their meticulously standing watch over events as they unfold.

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Maybe We Need to Say Less About Ethics

Of the four journalists, Lee’s psyche is the one that the movie most explores. So what do we learn about her? As a veteran, award-winning photojournalist, she’s been making pictorial news for a long time. And in the course of desensitizing herself from the horrors she records, she seems unnaturally cold-hearted, keeping her feelings apart from what she routinely bears witness to.

When Jessie, her innocent protege, inquires as to what she’d do if she saw Jessie dying, she responds almost robotically, “What do you think?”—clearly indicating she’d take a (detached) photo of her. But at the film’s climax, while Jessie has taught herself how to emulate her role model’s aberrant stoicism, Lee herself is experiencing anxiety attacks. This could hardly be more psychologically convincing, for though she’s managed to exile her fears, they’re not gone, just lurking behind her resolutely hard-nosed exterior. Nonetheless, however sickened she is by the gruesome sights she sees, she persists in expertly documenting these images—core to her individual sense of worth.

In short, Lee has deliberately taught herself how to be inured to scenes of cruelty and violence, simultaneous with exhibiting an ongoing struggle to assimilate her native country’s democracy literally being blown to bits.

What, Finally, Might Be the Movie’s Message?

The only thing that can be said for certain is that this is an antiwar movie, despite its being essentially different from so many other such movies. What it dramatizes is frighteningly abhorrent, and there’s no inkling that anything positive can come from its disturbing conflict. After all, we’re primarily fighting, or acting out, against ourselves. It could be said that here the enemy is best located not from without but from deep within.

Ultimately, if there’s a remedy for such extreme self-alienation, it would have to be in creating a much closer-knit, compassionate community—one in which rampant individualism is painstakingly kept in check.

Just how that might occur Garland doesn’t address. Still, it’s obvious that he’s anxious for everyone—in the United States or elsewhere—to give it the most serious thought, and to act upon it as well.

© 2024 Leon F. Seltzer, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved.