Civil War is Loud and Empty

Alex Garland's new film has nothing to say, but it shouts at you regardless.

Early on in Alex Garland’s new film Civil War, Kirsten Dunst’s photojournalist, Lee, lays naked in a bath – in the quiet solitude of the moment her thoughts turn inevitably to the grotesque. Her mind is wracked by the images she’s taken over the course of her career. We see, through her mind’s camera lens, a black man trapped in a tire being burned alive. This is not the only time the film shows you an image like this. It is, in fact, one of Garland’s only manoeuvrers here. And yet the civil war – an American civil war! – that the film portrays is strangely without any racial element, one of the many unbelievable aspects of this dystopia. Both sides have diverse combatants, both sides commit war crimes. Both sides all the way down like the writing in the middle of a stick of rock. At one point a character namechecks an inciting incident of the war (and of Lee’s career as a journalist) being something called “the Antifa massacre,” but it is kept vague as to whether that was a massacre of Antifa, or a massacre committed by them. This is what the film’s politics are. The civil war cannot have any ideology because Garland wants to keep things vague, but in keeping things vague he displays a laughable ignorance about ideological division in America. When the characters do encounter a racist soldier, they almost seem confused, as if it is the first time they’d come across anybody like this. At one point, in the middle of a shootout, Lee lies down out of the path of gunfire, and she notices that even here in the midst of this battlefield, there are flowers growing. Wow. Profound!

Nobody making this film could have known the context in which it would end up being released, but even if there wasn’t currently an ongoing genocide it would feel in poor taste thanks to the bludgeon-like use of images of black suffering and the thuddingly obvious visual metaphors (hanged bodies next to sports graffiti, a Winter Wonderland turned into a battlefield and so on). If the film is about anything it isn’t about the circumstances that emerge in civil conflict but the role of journalists in wartime, but its analysis of this feels mostly like Garland read a summary of Judith Butler’s Frames of War rather than engaging with any further thinking on the subject. The film gets ahead of itself and excuses the images it keeps showing us as, after all, these are images produced by the vulture-like journalists in the film rather than the director himself, a tiresome stop-hitting-yourself gesture if ever there was one. That I found both Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny’s performances to be effective is a credit to both actresses. Dunst works well in a role more typically given to men – the rough, jaded veteran paired with a younger, more idealistic woman. It’s not the only way that the film seems to draw from video games like The Last of Us (itself a work with an uncomfortable habit of using real-world violence for metaphor). It’s a road trip through the country divided into episodic segments. In each one, the travellers encounter a group of people worse than the last, showcasing the descent into depravity, until they reach an extended shootout raid and a feel-bad final moment. We’ve all seen this film before, and we’re tired of it. If The Zone of Interest took on a further meaning through the time of its release and prompted audiences to reflect on the similarities between then and now, Civil War does the opposite: any profundity it may have appeared to hold looks like naked cowardice in the light of the current moment.