Alex Garland's fourth feature belongs to a well-defined sub-category of Hollywood cinema that had its moment of glory a few decades ago. A sub-category that set itself apart by the way it mixed the conventions of violent adventure with reflection upon it, or more precisely, the way it maintained some distance from it by blending in a particular relationship to politics and contemporary history along with the moral conditions of individual commitment.
The characters in Civil War are war reporters, both involved in and caught up in the heart of a conflict, becoming the subjects, objects and witnesses of a bloody story. This is the type of character embodied, with a certain charisma, by Mel Gibson and Linda Hunt in Peter Weir's The Year of Living Dangerously (1982), Gene Hackman, Nick Nolte and Joanna Cassidy in Roger Spottiswoode's Under Fire (1983), or James Woods in Oliver Stone's Salvador (1986). But while each of these titles is rooted in a real conflict, entrenched in current events or the recent past, Civil War is futuristic speculation, imagining a new civil war tearing the US apart in the not-too-distant future.
Kirsten Dunst plays Lee, a war reporter on her way to Washington, DC to meet the president, who is presumably trapped in the White House surrounded by secessionist troops. She takes under her wing a young photographer's apprentice, played by Cailee Spaeny, who is determined to follow in the footsteps of a mentor she admires. Accompanied by two male colleagues, the female duo travels through locations overwhelmed by destruction. At times they experience dangerous adventures in which gratuitous barbarity leaves its mark: the barbarity of men at war left to their own devices, nationalist and racist militias in action, and summary executions. Witnessing acts of cruel inhumanity that they record at the peril of their lives, the two heroines see their relationship evolve. Civil War becomes a war road movie, continuously weighted down by suspense and uplifted by the quality of its direction.
Ideological confusion
Jacques Prévert is quoted as saying, "Peace is when there is war elsewhere." Garland's entire project seems to be contained in this method of transposing images of military conflict recorded across the world and broadcast in the media to the heart of the "domestic" space of the US. The universe described and the proposition imagined here can be understood as a logical (if not credible) extrapolation of contemporary America, torn in two and threatened by a fracture exemplified by the end of Donald Trump's term of office and the assault on the Capitol. Moreover, the film embraces a certain ideological confusion in the way it juxtaposes the federal state with fascist and separatist squads.
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