Civil War

In the near future, the USA has fallen into Civil War and its president is clinging onto power. A group of photo-journalists (Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson) make their way to Washington DC to try to get an interview with him before rebels reach the White House.

Spoilers

I probably would have ignored this were it not for Alex Garland being at the helm, but Civil War is nevertheless a trope-ridden, toothless road-trip thriller.

And by tropes I mean pretty much everything you can think of:

• Wise old black man who dies
• Funny Asian friend who appears late in the film and whose sole purpose, is to die
• Car pulls up slowly to a dead body in the road with no one else around
• Grizzled old photographer doesn’t want a ‘kid’ travelling with her but eventually warms to the kid because by god the kid’s got talent

The final scenes in the White House are particularly galling and clumsy attempts at poetic imagery.

The script tries to write out some of this guff with a self-aware tinge but adding the words “yeah yeah, I know what you’re going to say” before having the character just say it anyway doesn’t make it any less hackneyed.

But really it’s the failure to really say anything that stings here. It’s not a political thriller, a war film or even a satire, the whole premise of the US being in a Civil War is barely explored at all.

No, this is very much a film about journalism and photographers, and by that I mean literally the courage it takes to step out into the line of fire to get a picture, and the mental toll that can take on you. So why then set it all in a too-close-for-comfort war in the near future? The idea that America is in the midst of a second Civil War raises a lot of questions that completely distract from the central story, but judging by the title it’s also what the film wants you to think about? It’s all a bit of a mess, and feels like the more-indie more-interesting sequel to a film we never saw.

I can’t fault the performances, and Alex Garland has an eye for a really good shot, but wow am I struggling to see what he was going for with this film. On release it drew some criticism for using AI to make posters of stuff that didn’t even remotely happen in the film. Well one has to wonder if AI was also used in writing the actual screenplay. It’s so limp and non-comittal for such an explosive premise.