America is on fire in “Civil War”, not just metaphorically, but literally. The “Western Forces”, a war coalition between California and Texas, fight against government troops and an authoritarian president barricaded in Washington, who has granted himself an unconstitutional third term in office and disbanded the FBI. It is clear that Alex Garland’s civil war-torn America in “Civil War” triggers a whole range of themes, including the storming of the American Capitol and the culture war. Especially as the film will be released in cinemas in 2024, the year of the US elections. Anyone who has read the synopsis or seen the trailer cannot help but read the film as a commentary on present-day America, as an exaggerated dystopia as a result of Trump’s adversary.
Even if all of this may be wafting around in the margins: “Civil War” is not a film about current US politics or Trump, but goes far beyond that. Garland deliberately keeps the background to his dystopian scenario and the political references vague, creating a space for discourse that is as productive as it is impressive.
Once again, the British director shows himself to be a border crosser who pushes his characters to the genre-induced cinematographic edges of contemporary discourse. In his debut “Ex Machina”, about two men and a robot girl, he explored the question of what makes humans human; in the Netflix production “Extinction”, he sent a group of five women into a mysterious zone in which humans, animals and nature are constantly mutating. With “Men”, he staged a style-conscious folk horror that turned out to be an eccentric allegory of trauma and toxic masculinity.
Civil War“ is also a deeply subversive film: about spirals of escalation in a state of emergency, but above all about the staging and documentation of war as a reaction to contemporary image lust. But what stories are behind the visual “content”, behind the thousands and thousands of images that are thrown at us?
One of the many outstanding scenes can also be read as a motif setting. Renowned war photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst) has just helped up-and-coming photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) out of a dicey situation when a suicide bomber runs into the crowd and kills dozens of people. While the movie itself staggers, the sound and the world seem to stand still for a moment, Jessie observes her role model pointing her camera at the piles of corpses and takes a photo of the photographer. “Civil War” is about the power of images and about questioning their mechanisms – on all levels.
The story: Reuters reporter Joel (Wagner Moura), Lee, the over-motivated Jessie and the old New York Times bunny Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) set off on the – also non-metaphorical – journey into the heart of darkness to get the first interview in a long time with the president in Washington D.C., 500 miles away. The stops along the way reveal a country on the brink.
What appears to be a road trip and juggles with genre set pieces in a relaxed and fluffy manner is a reckoning with clumsy staging strategies. The atmospheric soundtrack repeatedly breaks off during the journey towards the capital and drastic images are edited in. Garland plants images from the wars of the present, from Ukraine or Syria, in his America: corpses in mass graves, a person being burned alive. In between, a slow-motion shot bursting with terrible beauty, in which the quartet drives through a burning forest. In these contrasts between the drastic and the stylized, Garland reflects on his medium.
The perspective he chooses is as consistent as it is disturbing, as female war photographers fight on the front line for the images that go around the world – today at an unbelievable speed via social media, which play no role in “Civil War” and yet seem omnipresent. The photographers act in the spirit of the journalistic ethos of documentary enlightenment and at the same time are driven by a horror lifestyle. Jessie once says that she has never felt so afraid and so alive at the same time. The association of the camera as a weapon comes to mind in this profession.
War photographers bring light into the historical darkness of war with their pictures. As other war photographer films have previously shown, these are images that must exist, but they come at a high price on very different levels, especially on a personal level. Christian Frei worked on this ambivalence in “War Photographer”, his portrait of war photographer James Nachtwey. Or Matthew Heineman, whose biopic “A Private War” tells the story of the American journalist Marie Colvin, who reported from crisis and war zones for the Sunday Times, among others, and was killed in an artillery attack in Homs, Syria, in 2012.
Garland does not pass judgment on his quartet, but talks about his human characters, above all Lee and Jessie, about the end of a visual innocence. While the former photographs everything and is dedicated to pure documentation (“We record it so that other people will ask questions”), the latter licks blood after initial difficulties and later runs shoulder to shoulder with the troops through bombed-out streets.
The British director brings the subgenre into a dystopian escalation of our present day. For where war photographers were previously a moral metaphor in films as upholders in the war against human confusion, in “Civil War” they act in a world that has lost all rationality, a world on the edge of the abyss, in which they are the service providers for a lust for violent images devoid of any morality.