Well, the good news is that they didn’t go the obvious and, frankly, dumb route. The bad news is that the road that they took about a story about wartime photographers was somehow blander than I could’ve even tried making it.
Alex Garland’s Civil War is about a group of professional and independent journalists who are putting their lives on the line to capture moments in real time. What the movie doesn’t show us: the reasons why they care so deeply about the impact that the movie claims they are going out of their way to make. Is “because it preserves history” really enough? Not for this movie, no. The importance of documenting events goes without saying, so what does this leave the movie with in terms of its purpose? To show what it’s like to be a ground-zero reporter? To show a young girl make her way into an industry she might not be cut out for? Or, to get more topical, to show how divided this country currently is? I don’t know.
The most damaging bruise to the film’s admirable approach and admittedly interesting premise — particularly its focus on journalists — is the dull-as-wood characters. The actors do a fine job with what they’re given but, unfortunately, what they had to work with was Garland’s script. He puts next to zero effort into fleshing out the main characters beyond their bare-bones traits of: photographer, driver, old man and underdog. There’s barely anything to relate to when watching the film, which is unfortunate because I feel so much could have been done with this journalistic angle. To briefly do a somewhat-thought-out rewrite, I would’ve found it infinitely more interesting had the film depicted reporters actually reporting on the war at hand. Take Kirsten Dunst’s photographer character, Lee, or her press partner — had they also been writing stories along the way, the movie would’ve felt so much more consequential. As a journalist myself, it’s what I would’ve liked to see, but even for general audiences, I think it could have made for a much more layered film.
In an age where every second of our world is (sometimes unwillingly) documented by anyone with an iPhone, too often do we take for granted the hard work done by journalists and guerilla photographers. I think the latter half of that sentiment may just be the central message of Garland’s film, but the boring characters kill any enthusiasm or genuine interest. This may sound a bit silly but I feel like the film could’ve benefited from one of those cliche “I won’t stop until the world knows the truth!” lines. It needed anything to make me feel more about what was happening because if the characters are lifeless, then I’m left with a movie that took a gimmick of an apocalyptic, near-future America and added in a half-baked take on the importance of journalism. But to return to the point of modern technology, I think there is truth to the idea that anyone can be a reporter if they document current events in some way. This is all the more reason why the film needed to emphasize why the jobs of the characters we are following stand out among the rest. What are they gaining from this? Who’s even receiving the news that’s being broadcast by other members of the press who we see in the background? What about the millions of people who’ve been affected by the war? I understand that our main characters are just photographers but I think the choice to focus on photography alone hurt the film.
Again, I must say that I admire the restraint to not reference or even heavily allude to specific parts of real life; the most “political” (in the modern sense of the word, meaning “controversial”) it gets is the mentioning of each state’s allegiance. Garland’s direction does a good job of showing a firsthand perspective but he needed to lean more into the characters' motivations, as they must be a major part of why they’ve chosen to take on these roles in society.
4/19/24
I don't really intend to watch this film, but I have a central question about it: is it really possible to make a fiction about a political event like such a civil war without engaging in some kind of politics? You and some other viewers of this film that I've read and heard seem to think it's somehow praiseworthy for the movie to not get implicated in an overt political viewpoint, yet all at the same time criticise it for being shallow and unengaging.
To me it seems inevitable that it would be so, since if you subtract the politics from a film like this you're left with the tremedously banal take that "violence is bad". This is fairly widely known.
I would respect the film if it took either a left- or right- wing stance, or even a coherent centrist one if such a thing is possible. I just think the apolitical "plague on both your houses" point of view is so overused anyway, it's essentially the media's default setting. It's boring in itself as such a bland nothing cop-out, and so clearly inappropriate for such subject matter.