America’s hard-on for inner division foams at the mouth in Alex Garland’s politically empty Civil War, a Children of Men (2006)-like journey about Ethics in War Correspondence. Along the way, Garland’s direction stutter-steps and nearly seizes up on itself, faltering as often as it succeeds in creating clear images, as Rob Hardy’s camera rarely cultivates the successful marriage of theme and image. The film is plodding, bloated, and irresponsible, distributor A24’s most expensive project, almost as though it was made as a cynical response to their heightened valuation as a company. The text of the film is politically insipid, and thoughtless, and delivers no actionable message to the audience.
What the film is trying to do is obvious and cheap. Civil War attempts to have its cake and eat it, too: it wants to use contemporary political division as window dressing but it neither interrogates nor utilizes any of this to any meaningful end. The film is not about the Second Civil War, exactly, it’s about these photojournalists who document the obscenity of the conflict. It’s about the culpability of journalists in the fray, blaming individuals for systemic problems, and not taking any accountability for its broad and painfully childish vision of war.
That Alex Garland says the film is somehow connected to his last interminable dud Men (2022) is deeply revealing. It shows that Garland has lost the forest for the trees, has misinterpreted mixed metaphors as being prime text, and no longer understands the vision of his camera in a movie about cameras and what they do. There is a functional clash between what the film wants to portray, how it portrays it, and what it has to say about that, resulting in nothing of value being said.
There is another side of it that is acceptable in an enjoyable way. That is if we take the film as a dystopian journey that is modeled directly after Children of Men, which is a good case study for how an idea can work badly and how the same idea can work perfectly with more astute direction, where the form and function of the piece match. But we can still disassemble the film, take it as less than the sum of its parts, and say, there is some semblance of an apocalyptic road movie inside it. What doesn’t work is how distance is covered, the way characters develop against each other, and that each event feels so painfully reduced to simple story beats that drive the vehicle forward.
It’s not for lack of trying. There are good actors in this movie. Kirsten Dunst is trying as a renowned photojournalist and Cailee Spaeny is very good as her understudy. They have a nice mother-daughter type of affection that grows and broadens as the film arrives at its inevitable and plainly boring conclusion. Wagner Moura and Stephen McKinley Henderson represent… well, exactly the same dynamic, in a father-son way, but nothing meaningful is really done with either of their characters or the deep convictions that must lead them to do this work, they are simply mirrors held up to the leading women, a representation of the passing of the torch that has already happened, establishing that there is a history, and these folks have worked together for a long time.
It’s hard to buy the subtext around the film which is to say there isn’t hardly any. It feels vapid and to the point, over-extended, and yet so simple and empty that nothing can really be gleaned from what transpires in front of the camera. Many of the shots, from the blocking to the framing, are pretty bad and lack centralized images, cannot meaningfully convey context or a useful sense of space, and generally, the film looks pretty bad, even when you can tell that is trying to paint a more colorful, pretty image. It never arrives at any images that ought to last with any viewer, which is doubly terrible, for a film about such extreme photography, where the extreme conditions and subjects ought to bring something, anything, out in us. All we feel is empty.
Alex Garland says that this is the end, again. And maybe he’ll come back and retire again. But his last two movies, Men and Civil War, find a director who has lost his agency behind the camera. Within A24’s artist-friendly repertoire, this feels antithetical to their usual mission. Perhaps they did give Alex Garland total control and he just had nothing left. Maybe some directors only have so many movies in them. He had to go and make Ex Machina (2015) and had to go and write a few pretty great films, but now we’ve reached the end of the road. The film does not even have what you might expect to be frustrated by about it, it does not even have enough political curiosity for what’s portrayed to mean anything. This is empty filmmaking done on a scale that’s probably too large for what it needs to be. There are some good performances here and nothing else. A director divided against themselves cannot stand. Mr. Garland, please enjoy your retirement.