Alex Garland’s Civil War takes place in a dystopian world where telescopic camera lenses have been outlawed and journalists have to take photos of war five inches away from the soldiers. Basically, the movie is a 100 minute answer to the nail-biting theme “What if there was a war in a civilized white country?” But like a pornographic video, Civil War is a meandering and meaningless journey that ends in a “climax” that doesn’t resolve any questions, just a literal finish line for the participants to get across. The difference is that porn is entertaining to watch, while Civil War is tedious, like homework but without the educational value.
Even when I saw the first trailer I had a pretty good idea what Civil War was going to be like. The “heroes” of the story are war journalists, so self-inserts for the people making the movie to feel good about themselves. “People who take photos are literally braver than soldiers!” I could tell this was an art house movie that was filmed for the purpose of winning a bunch of awards for being a good film without actually being a good film. Imagine a car that’s designed to win awards for being a good car, but isn’t a good car and doesn’t have any of the characteristics of a good car. That’s the problem with Civil War.
I’m not kidding when I say the main characters are a liberal self-insert. Middle aged liberal photographers went to Iraq and wouldn’t go outside without a hundred American soldiers guarding them. But in the minds of these silly hippies, they are heroes like Rambo. Do these people actually think if the USA collapsed into a civil war, every armed faction would be happy to accept a random group of journos and be their personal bodyguards in fire fights? Apparently, that’s exactly what middle aged liberals think.
Civil War was somehow obsolete before it was even released. Since it started production in 2020, we’ve had a real life war in a European country, Ukraine. Soldiers on both sides have their personal cameras and upload tons of videos, and governments have just given up trying to stop them from doing this. Meanwhile, the actual journalists are mostly kept far away from the fighting. They’re certainly not in the middle of intense urban combat like what is shown in the movie. In an era of cheap digital cameras, what is even the point of journalists participating in war zones? That’s a good question. Garland did not get the memo. He even depicts one of the female journalists as running around with an old film camera, because the grainy black and white photos look cool, the exact thing that aging hippies like and think is deep.
There was even a montage of a girl taking photos of various war crimes around the world, which came across as accidentally funny. There was one shot of her photographing an African warlord about to execute someone with his pistol. Like… what was the back story here? Was he fine with this random journalist photographing him executing people? Did he object? “Excuse me Miss, I’m trying to execute my enemies, can you get out of my face for one minute?” Either that, or he actually asked her to photograph him executing his enemies – which is nice, but it makes her more of his personal publicist than a journalist. “Cool and Sexy Warlord Executes His Enemies, Who Are Dumb and Gay.”
That’s actually a problem with the whole premise, it’s supposed to be shocking, but isn’t. Like I said in the opening, it’s just “WHAT IF THERE WAS A WAR, BUT IN A CIVILIZED COUNTRY?” I’m sorry, but it’s just not that shocking to see white European people killing each other. But Garland thinks it is shocking, and made a whole movie telling everyone that he thinks it is shocking.
At the beginning of Civil War, our heroic journos are in New York. Okay fine, but when one of them announced that they have to travel to Washington DC to interview the president, I groaned out loud. Right then I knew this movie was going to be a “journey” where they see various bad things completely unrelated to the plot just to fill up screen time, and that’s exactly what happened. It reminded me of Harold and Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay, which is about two guys who like weed who (as the title suggests) escape from Guantanamo Bay and are chased by an evil FBI agent across America, with a lot of jokes about drugs and ethnic stereotypes along the way. Then at the end they meet President George W. Bush, and smoke weed with him at his ranch. So that movie had a political point about the early 2000s USA that is still true today. Come to think of it, even the Beavis and Butthead movie had a coherent point about the dangers of authoritarian government. Civil War has no point at all, and this was apparently deliberate. Liberals think having no point and being clever are the same thing.
That could have been the saving grace of this movie, if the characters met the president and had some sort of deep conversation with him – or perhaps a farcical one. Maybe, for example, the president is an idiot who isn’t even aware there’s a civil war. That’s the whole point of a quest plot like in Apocalypse Now, and the Conrad novel it’s based on, Heart of Darkness. If the plot alludes to some sort of important character that everyone urgently wants to meet, then of course they should actually meet him before the story ends. But in Civil War, the president shows up on screen and dies immediately, and the movie is over. It was a total waste of time. It’s never explained if the president was good or bad, or why some Americans want to kill him. It’s not even known which side are the good guys, or why they’re fighting.
Garland is a Brit, so it was mildly interesting to see hysterical British stereotypes about the USA. What I found most intriguing was the difference between rural and urban. Most of the “bad” stuff in the movie happens in scenic rural areas, which I find to be quite beautiful. But in Garland’s mindset, these nice stretches of countryside are terrible and filled with nasty rednecks, and this is the main lesson of the movie. As an American, I will say this is awful advice. If the US government actually collapsed, the safest place would be in flyover country – go there and learn how to plant corn and you’ll be fine. But Garland seems to think the opposite. Avoid those bad bigoted rednecks and go to the most urban area you can find. Yeah… like I said, bad advice.
Speaking of urban areas, if law and order broke down to the extent as Civil War portrays, there would be a huge amount of looting, pillaging, and race riots. But Garland didn’t want to show that, which makes his story even more pointless, since after all, he was deliberately avoiding making any kind of useful point.
Civil War allegedly cost around $50-60 million to make, and I can’t imagine how. The special effects and CGI were really horrible. Sometimes the computer-generated vehicles weren’t even scaled correctly with the people running alongside them. There was one scene when a girl falls into a mass grave, and it’s very obvious that the “corpses” are made out of rubber. The corpses actually looked okay when she wasn’t bumping up against them. They could have at least re-shot that scene and told the girl not to move so much. I miss the 1990s, back when filmmakers actually cared if their movies looked good or not.
Okay so I actually lied a little when I said this movie had no point. It does have a fairly obvious point. Donald Trump is bad, and bad conservative gun owners are going to rebel and shoot the president and all of the liberals. But considering how stupid and annoying all of the liberal characters are in this movie, is that really a bad thing? Jokes aside, the casual violence is concerning. Horrific atrocities like what was shown in this movie tend to not happen in countries with an average IQ above 70… unless there is some sort of compelling ideological or political reason to kill. Insurgents like the Haitans or Algerians brutally killed their European colonist neighbors because they had been oppressed for centuries and had genuine reasons to feel hatred. But what would compel Americans to slaughter each other with the same viciousness? For example, the president’s press secretary (who has an unfortunate resemblance to our real life press secretary) tries to negotiate with the rebel soldiers just to be gunned down for no reason. Why? The movie doesn’t explain, and that’s concerning, because apparently Garland thinks humans just butcher other humans for no reason and there’s no need for a storyteller to invent a reason. The irony here is that western liberals portray their geopolitical enemies as considering life cheap when it is actually western liberals themselves who think life is cheap.
Bad movies in the ’80s would at least have a sex scene so teenage boys would like it, but all of the characters in post-Weinstein movies are ugly and asexual, so there’s not even that anymore.
Ian Kummer
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Yeah, and the only comic relief was the 4th wall .
A better movie would be if they made Lind’s Victoria into one.