Given the fractured state of our country, there are so many ways to interpret and dissect “Civil War” as a film. For some, it makes for one hell of a clarion call to both those who inspire change and those who merely react to it; for others, it’s an exercise in edgelord clickbait nonsense that deliberately refuses to elaborate on the actual macroeconomics of what it’s actually trying to say.
If you were to ask me……I’m more for the former.
Alex Garland, as a director, has a tendency to let this….this brutal lucidity guide him whenever and wherever portion of his work he decides to focus on. Putting aside his efficiency for effortlessly blending the natural with the unnatural, his post-modernist approach always has a method to the madness and the fact his direction remains watertight as ever makes his basic trajectory that much more engrossing.
For a $50 million dollar budget, there’s only so much I can say about how the visual language of this film is right up there with some of the most peculiarly interesting of A24’s collection. In comparison to other movies with similar plots like this, the production design looks and feels much staler than, say, Apocalypse Now or even Annihilation but there’s a strange dichotomy present in how these pastoral landscapes still capture immensity in the imagery they display, even without the lush natural Mother Nature aesthetic to make it pop. The sparse breadcrumbs of worldbuilding mixed with this expansive blockbuster gaze disguises it as such with an enlarged scope while the innocuous small scale story fully utilizes its 1.85:1 aspect ratio to great effect. Given how much of a trademark it’s become to certain A24 films, an eerily tantalizing atmosphere is almost certainly a must.
That emphasis on height scaling is also a massive factor in how the towering dread permeates every single frame of Rob Hardy’s camerawork, intersplicing besetting stillness and simplicity with vibrant finesse that allows the ugliness from each frame to pop out, especially as its extremely confident in the films controlled pacing and concert quality sound design. So much of the OST feels like an ethereal state of tiny numbing little thunderbolts, screaming at your synapses while some of the music choices are…..well, I’d like to say they’re more distracting than cheeky but Full Metal Jacket did this exact same thing.
Do I need to say anything on the acting? You know they’re all great. Sucks that the characters they’re given are archetypal and stereotypical in the plainest sense and are stuck with Garland’s usual clunky dialogue occasionally…..but at least, they have distinct contrasting personalities with defined arcs and relatable levity that the actors carry over to them.
So, this movies decision to focus on photojournalism as the crux to guide this story along can be seen as the predictable, safe choice but also a wise one as an unaffiliated peek through the looking glass. As the structure here is very similarly constructed to Children of Men, its presentation is almost specifically designed to revel and abhor our fascination with the battlefield and breaking that down with these episodic beats makes it come off like the most liminal Garland’s been with his work since…..well, since Men.
And just like his other works, the Civil War itself is mainly a vehicle for emotional provocation and character building, another assumed state of reality transforming into a heavily uncertain status quo deliberately burying important texts under mountains of subtexts while using the photographs themselves as excellent motifs; a fascinating examination of how journalism can help others make sense of their crumbling realities but also pick apart the exploitative nature to those journalistic acts; turning people’s images and voices into content or thrill-seeking; kinda like how some people use TikTok. And when that veils gradually starts fade away from our characters, you quickly begin to realize they’re not any better than people causing the senseless atrocities around them.
It doesn’t take a genius level intellect to see how the violent uncertainty of life in a nation of crisis, especially in a year of red-hot tension like this, bled itself dry enough for Garland to paint the rest of the picture for us; no need to show us anything from the actual Civil War or 2020. He sees no need to spoon feed us and lets our assumptions of American politics fill in the rest. It’s not meant to answer the questions that the imagery brings up, yet I can understand the people who want to pick a side in this conflict based on their personal political/ideological bias or who don’t think the film actually says anything. Some say the neutral impartiality with the lack of context makes his vision irresponsible, and I’d say it only makes what we see that much more unsettling because Garland’s argument isn’t ‘What happens when a country walks blindly into its own destruction and how’ because it’s already happened. It’s ’What happens after’.
Depicting the best and worst of humanity’s impulses is one thing but the political violence we end up seeing and having it eerily match the chaotic randomness we often hear about and see on the news all the freakin’ time? There’s something almost innate about the way this film kept playing tricks on my mind; how proudly it courts controversy like a dirty towel to cut through our self-deceit. Yes, the blatant unsubtlety of the chords being struck here can be annoying but I’ve said it countless times already: sometimes the heavy-handed messages are best left hammered into your skull because how else are we going to get it?
THAT BEING SAID…….my issue with this movie isn’t its lack of anything important to say. It’s the overabundance of it.
Putting aside how derivative his vision of societal collapse is unfortunately (seriously, we’ve seen this played out a lot in previous years), Garland has simply way too many ideas he wants to poke holes through and dissect between the thrill of the perfect shot, how the violence and horrors of war turn us all into self-serving monsters for survival, the lack of limiting forces on polarization and desensitizing violence in general while not romanticizing it among many others and the paltry near-two hour runtime isn’t nearly enough time to balance all that ambition or to get proper word of mouth out on any of those themes.
With all that baggage out there, I feel more comfortable in saying Civil War is one of those movies where I can look back and say “Yeah, I liked what it tried to do. Not sure I liked it but I can appreciate it.”
