Base of the Western Forces Attacking DC

“Lovefingers” by Silver Apple / A Song in Civil War

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Review of Civil War

John Fraim

The film Civil War opened in middle April of 2024, seven months from the Presidential election in November. I saw the first screening of it in Columbus at the old Drexel theater on Main Street in Bexley. I was stunned by the film and felt different than I usually do after seeing a film. I was with my good friend Jim, my movie-going buddy. Jim was former president of the arts council in Columbus and a movie goer like me.

It was a Friday night and Jim and had found a little Italian fast food place and got dinner. We discussed the film during dinner. We both agreed it was a powerful film but there was something about it that lingered a little out of sight, undefinable. It was more frustrating since I had just completed a book about various screenwriting theories in Hollywood called Hollywood Safari and was usually able to understand what was going on in films. This film was different for some reason.

I had written a column for Script Magazine about the symbolism in films. One of the things I discussed with Jim at dinner was the use of color symbolism in the film. Normally, the sides in battle wear uniforms of particular colors. But in Civil War, the uniforms colors are the same. In a way, the film is a revisioning of the Civil War in the 1860s, placing it in juxtaposition to the blue and grey colors of Union and Confederate forces. The combatants in the film Civil War are rather a colorless blur of beige and brown. 

While the Civil War of history was brutal, the fictional battle of the film has turned from brutality into savagery. A almost zombie-like state has enveloped much of the population while some have escaped it by living in states like Colorado and Missouri. It is noteworthy that the film’s Director – Alex Garland – has directed some interesting zombie films like 28 Days Later (2002). This seems to be the state of most of those fighting the film civil war now, in its final days.

I rename the film the “Uncivil War” as it makes the battle between North and South civil when compared to this modern battle. At least one knew what side they were fighting on. This distinction is lost in Garland’s Civil War. For example, the photojournalists in the film come upon two snipers firing at shots at an abandoned mansion nearby. When asked if they are shooting at the enemy, neither knows. They just know someone is trying to kill them.

Battle of Gettysburg in American Civil War / When Sides Were Defined

In this world, it has become impossible to tell enemy from comrade. But then, there is a sense this doesn’t matter anymore.

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The story involves a road trip by four war photojournalists from New York City to Washington DC during the final days of a battle between a dictator President in his third term and the Western Forces composed of Texas and California. Garland avoids taking a political position in his Civil War and having the biggest current blue state of California join forces with the biggest red state of Texas serves to skewer the viewer’s common perceptions about these states.

There are moments of peace and reflection in their trip. They stop in a quiet little town that seems something out of the Twilight Zone with all the war raging about it. The photojournalists stop in a little retail shop in the town and a sales person reads a book and tells them they have simply chosen not to get involved with the war. Some of the nation, like out in Colorado and Missouri, people are out of the battle, not affiliated with either side.

The battles in the film almost seem hallucinatory and perhaps reminders of an urban Vietnam. The battle is intense, and the camera’s view moves freely through the employment of a new DJI film camera. It triggers my memory about scenes from Apocalypse Now. The footage is powerful and the viewer with new perspectives using a new camera technology for the first time in a major film. 

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After dinner and our discussion of the film, I drove Jim back to his car. Both of us agreed the film was unique and powerful but neither of us could define something that seemed to lurk behind its meaning. I headed home thinking about the film. I told my wife Stephanie about it and told her she had to go see it. She wasn’t too interested and said she would think about it. 

The next day I read all the reviews about Civil War I could find. There were a lot of them. It was breaking records for the film company that produced it A24. But none of the reviews really answered the lingering question I had about the film. It was something I really couldn’t put my finger on. 

Later in the day, I read the review of Civil War in The Hollywood Reporter by Richard Newby titled “Why Civil War is Making Audiences so Uncomfortable.” Finally, someone expressed what was on my mind about the film but could not verbalize. As Newby writes in the review:

“Civil War is an abrasive and uncomfortable film, not because it fully subscribes to any particular ideology, but because it doesn’t — and we hate not having clearly defined sides to root for or against or media that doesn’t perfectly align with our worldview so we can walk out of the theater confidently knowing we’re a good person.”

One of the Combatants Jesse Plemons / Unclear Whose Side He’s On

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Newby’s article in THR defines that feeling Jim and I had after watching the film. A feeling of uncomfortableness about the film that was hard to get at the root cause. It was a feeling of being off balance and losing one’s old sense of equilibrium. Newby notes that this is because the film does not define the traditional protagonist and antagonist in the film. The photographers are more observers to the dynamics of the story than actors in the film. As the hardened, famous war photojournalist Lee Miller (played by Kirsten Dunst) says, their job is simply to record things and let others decide about heroes and villains.

In effect, what makes Civil War a very different type of film is not subject matter as much as its structure in not presenting the traditional hero and villain. Defining these would make the film another political film and Garland fights making it political. Everybody is the loser in this new world.

A new form of storytelling could be at hand rather than simply a new story. Does a film like Civil War usher in a new type of film that doesn’t define heroes and villains, rather leaving this function to the audience? An ambiguous perspective and point of view is provided by Garland and film goers are not accustomed to this ambiguity.

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In doing so little in defining protagonists and antagonists in Civil War, the film lets the reader participate in his or her own creation of a story from the film. The audience becomes more than a simple receiver of a story broadcast to them. They also become joint participants with the film in creating its meaning. It offers an example of what Marshall McLuhan might have termed a “cool” or “participatory media.” That is. it offers an interactive, two-way process. It takes McLuhan’s theory of cool seriously by presenting this cool perspective in a current blockbuster film.

Very little visual or other clues are given in the film. It is up to the audience to fill in the spaces by providing their own perspective on the story put before them. The uneasiness comes in part from having to reflect on the images and words and music and characters they have seen.

Photojournalist Wagner Moura After His Colleague Dies

It is the end of a savage, uncivil war they have witnessed for two hours. The dictator President is killed by the Western Forces in the last scene of the film. And one of the photojournalists in the group gets his photo with the President right before he is shot in the Oval Office. The photographic, black and white image of Western Forces troops crowd in around the body of the dead President for a group photo. They wear smiles of victory on their faces. The image lingers and fades slowly at the end of the film. The Western Forces have defeated the dictator. But in the end, there seems to be no victors.

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The lack of a political message is certainly something new for Hollywood. As well as reviewers from major publications who are not happy with this lack of a political message. The film is criticized by CNN noting the film offers visceral thrills but stays muddled in its political message. (Again, the assumption it has to have a political message) The Wall Street Journal notes the film offers “carnage without cause.” The reviewer writes the new film “depicts a dystopian, war-torn America, but it is strangely indifferent to the country’s actual socio-political fault lines.” Critic Justin Chang at The New Yorker views Civil War as presenting a “striking but muddled state of disunion.” He notes, “Garland’s war loses itself in a nonpartisan fog, a thought experiment that short-circuits thought.” Somehow, being “nonpartisan” creates a “fog” for Chang.

The quote from Richard Newby in The Hollywood Reporter is worth mentioning again. “Civil War is an abrasive and uncomfortable film, not because it fully subscribes to any particular ideology, but because it doesn’t — and we hate not having clearly defined sides to root for or against or media that doesn’t perfectly align with our worldview so we can walk out of the theater confidently knowing we’re a good person.”

This lack of a political message makes the film different from almost all Hollywood films and more unique and powerful for this reason. Reviewer Zack Beauchamp from Vox is one of the few reviewers – like Newby – who really the meaning of the film, praising it for staying away from politics noting “Civil War has little to say about America but a lot to say about war.” Adding, “You might think a movie about a second American civil war would be a thinly veiled Trump story. It’s not – and it’s better for it.”

Beauchamp mentions one of the key scenes in the film when a sniper opens fire on the reporters’ car, forcing them to take shelter beside two soldiers the sniper has also attacked. When the reporters ask the soldiers which side everyone is on, they scoff — explaining that he’s trying to kill them, and that’s all that matters. This scene, notes Beauchamp, “clarifies what the movie is really about: not how political order collapses into civil war, but what happens to a society after it does.”

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See Richard Newby’s articles in the Hollywood Reporter

Alex Garland, Director and Writer of Civil War

See the eclectic songs in Civil War