Critical Review of Civil War (2024)
A cluster of thoughts masquerading as a critical review of Civil War (2024), from director Alex Garland. His film is a money grab manipulating the anxieties of white America in an era of uprising culture masquerading as a critique of the ethics of photojournalism. Spoilers Below.
Opening with footage that could have been lifted from news coverage in 2020 and from today in university encampments around the country, Civil War brings us to an America where people wait for water, the crowd is dirty and desperate and violence breaks out–immediately we meet the young girl Jessie, clean and motivated, through whose eyes and innocence we watch the rest of the movie unfold. She is knocked down and made human, Lee our main character hollowly acted by Kristen Dunst saves her from further harm–while the dirty and desperate are made collateral killed in an explosion. We see Lee walk over their bodies for the perfect picture which the film wants us to see as, THE ETHICAL PROBLEM OF PHOTOJOURNALISM. Instead at the hotel after the explosion as Lee sits in a bath and drinks water, she risked nothing for only being inconvenienced by a down elevator–we are shown THE ETHICAL PROBLEM OF CAPITALIST RESOURCE HOARDING.
The movie is one long road trip from New York City to Washington DC forced to take detours, to reckon with the worst of the worst, the price of the story, and then our movie ends and you are left wondering what I just watched.
It felt like I was watching an early season of AMC’s The Walking Dead, with enthralling violence that has you on the edge of your seat, racism that reminds you the most dangerous thing will always be whiteness like the hard N-word in episode two of TWD and the brutal deaths of characters of color in Civil War, and of course cliche country music playing as a character dies. There were moments of genuinely stunning cinematography similar to TWD and the apocalyptic Altana, but only moments.
Yes, Civil War contained so much TWD that what it was missing, was women with depth, characters of color with storylines outside of magical Negro and THE ETHICAL PROBLEM OF PHOTOJOURNALISM glared back at you.
The bitch and the child were the only reflections of women we saw in the male-dominated film. A life of war journalism has hardened Lee compared to Jessie who is naive and dreaming of her own life as a war journalist. We get a single sentence on Lee’s motivations for doing this work which was to, “show the reality of war” and yet here with no one to show, no audience, and no media affiliation her purpose is what? Fame? History-making? Because the plot says she must, so she must. Being thrown Jessie to care for softens her as Jessie steals her place in the film. Lee disappears and you forget she is still traveling alongside them until it is time to scold or protect Jessie. Lee’s death is abrupt and the fault of Jessie who then goes ahead as the new her. Can there only be room for one woman? Jessie’s girlhood was left shredded in the bloodshed, and Lee was a part of that.
My favorite character was an elderly Black man who was Lee’s mentor and dear friend, and who was the burden, the wise sage, the savior. Sammy joins the hall of other magical Negroes who died protecting their white wards, along with Dick Halloran the Black chef from The Shining. These men dispense wisdom, warn against danger, and save everyone at great personal cost. Trained audiences of color who have seen this same trope over and over knew he was going to die, but the way he did? The way most of the characters brutally murdered on screen were Black or Brown? The way our bodies came undone again and again, in this crescendo to a man saying he was from Hong Kong and being shot in the chest. I expected violence and death, I just didn’t expect this civil war to look so antebellum in its division of violence.
Curious how white audiences viewed this movie? If they caught both Lee and Jessie’s parents being apolitical? Do they see the irony in their apolitical moral apathy as genocide is done with our tax dollars? Are they mentally on farms pretending none of this is happening too?
I would doubt that white audiences see anything other than a thriller, then violence as all hypothetical, as loving how the movie itself is apolitical we never learn why the war broke out, or what the different sides are fighting for. We witness the moment the Western Forces win the war and have no idea what was at stake if they did or didn’t. We hear of airstrikes against American citizens and nothing else.
This is no anti-war film. This is no indictment of the lengths Western journalists go to get a story, sometimes to the victims' detriment. This is not a form of protest against the budding violence of the far right and the repressive government we are facing.
No, it is a soda without carbonation, a sunset in greyscale whose marketing is the instability of now, the mass graves on the big screen and then ones on our phone screens, the water the dirty and dehumanized are fighting for drank up by lawns and golf courses, and this films elitist characters–this is a farce.
If this movie left you yearning for more, you are not alone. We firmly stand with the real photojournalists who have a purpose–show what is happening to their people, keep a record, and force others to bear witness. Like Emmett Till’s open casket photo and the image of the mother holding her dead infant in a burial shroud, some images become sparks for the revolution, I want a movie about them, the sparks, and those whose unjust murders became that one generation-defining shot–that should have been the movie.