Another demi-Kubrick fakes journalistic integrity.
That old political reprimand “Have you no decency?” has lost its force. Politicians and media folk show no compunction about lying and tyrannizing, which is how we get Alex Garland’s shameless new movie Civil War. You can’t trust Garland, one of the least of the demi-Kubricks. His topical subjects are less outré than Yorgos Lanthimos’s; plus, he’s less of a craftsman than David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, or Jonathan Glazer. Yet, in Civil War, Garland tries for visionary virtuosity, faking rawness and sensationalism, all to predict America’s collapse. Designed to be fun, it is, instead, offensive.
Garland’s story doesn’t examine America’s gnawing antagonisms, or admit how they’re based in socialist, anarchist agitation. Yet he’s on to something: His heroine, Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), is a celebrated war photographer who joins a crew of journalists embedded by the military as it tracks a protest/raid in Washington, D.C. This isn’t prescient, it merely exploits the January 6 riot (although Garland avoids any scrutiny of the “insurrection” hoax that is gradually being exposed and debunked). Whether out of naïveté or partisanship, Garland suspects that the media are to blame for how we got to a place of national disunity. For British-born Garland, America is both a punching bag and a test site for global anarchy.
Civil War replays recent social disturbances in a horror-movie context (not unlike the zombie-apocalypse film 28 Days Later, for which Garland wrote the screenplay). Via combat spectacle and “newsreel” footage, Lee and her colleagues observe a dystopic America, largely based on the George Floyd, Antifa, and BLM riots, then climaxing with a J6 pastiche (the White House under siege). Traveling through chaos, Lee encounters Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a citizen-journalist prototype (mostly artiste-journalist) who joins the trek to D.C. This team of journos (including Stephen McKinley Henderson to add black-American gravitas) witnesses coast-to-coast social breakdown: California and Texas have seceded while the rest of the country has turned into anarchic mobs and vigilantes. America at war resembles both Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Lee and company’s threadbare hope is sustained by the goal of eventually interviewing the president (Nick Offerman), a three-termer who can’t hold the country together. (It’s the film’s cheapest ploy — a white president doesn’t risk implicating what some call Obama’s third term.)
Garland’s violent fantasy is too flimsy to be a cautionary tale. Like his previous film, the feminist nightmare Men, Civil War insults the advocates it means to appease, twisting their beliefs and fears into Stephen King–level claptrap. This is what makes Garland a demi-Kubrick; Civil War lacks The Shining’s inscrutable grandiosity and Dr. Strangelove’s humor, yet it attempts to be dark and overemphatic like those films. Civil War mostly recalls Alfonso Cuarón’s apocalyptic Children of Men, The Hunt, The Mist, How to Blow Up a Pipeline, and White House Down.
The indistinguishably trite, impersonal spectacle in those movies’ scenarios obviously influenced Garland, who seems to know little about the USA except what he’s seen from corporate media’s lockstep ideological perspective. His characters are nerve-wracking clichés. The usually appealing Dunst has made another lousy career choice (following Power of the Dog), sympathizing with a professional journalist who, like so many, is actually a charlatan, ’twixt and ’tween enjoying privilege and lacking integrity. (The 53-year-old Garland is ’twixt and ’tween ambition and ignorance.) And Spaeny’s eager upstart Jessie represents Garland’s cynical view of citizen-journalism’s potential; she’s the personification of a naïve, irresponsible Millennial.
Obama’s Leave the World Behind proposed an appalling vision of apocalypse as the State of the Union. Garland’s Civil War is equally appalling because it isn’t political. Garland never explicates the real-life lead-up to civil destruction: corrupt pols who betray their constituents, the moral bankruptcy of society, the degradation of popular culture, and the temerity of rich journalists dedicated to whatever political power endows their privilege. Garland lacks the necessary skepticism of the media — such as that expressed by Lee Smith, a conservative think-tanker who recently called NPR “a US-taxpayer-supported core of media infrastructure that has destabilized America in partnership with intelligence services and political operatives on behalf of oligarchic interests.” On a different scale, Civil War unintentionally indicts irresponsible news media. Garland’s hipster fakery is so outrageous and ludicrous that only a clod would take its indecency seriously.
