Alex Garland’s Civil War isn’t the movie you might expect from its trailers, which portray the film as an action blockbuster set amid an apocalyptic near-future conflict between a loose confederation of Western states and the federal government in Washington, D.C. Don’t expect massive battles over American cities. The violence is brutal but mostly brief. For much of the film’s hour and 49-minute runtime, the threat of death looms largely off-screen, Jaws-style, rather than in-your-face like Saving Private Ryan.
Nor is it a more cerebral examination of America’s deep social and political polarization that writer-director Garland has decried while promoting the movie. Beyond some brief exposition that the federal government has become tyrannical and the Western Forces composed of California and Texas have embraced secessionism, we’re never given any explanation for why people are fighting each other to the death.
The film’s protagonists, led by renowned war photographer Lee Smith (played by Kirsten Dunst), don’t seem particularly interested in lamenting what’s become of their nation either. Smith, flanked by her colleague Joel (Wagner Moura) and mentor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), sets out on a suicide mission from New York City to the nation’s capital, seeking to interview the president (Nick Offerman) while snapping photos of all the carnage in between.
They’re joined by Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a 20-something aspiring photojournalist who idolizes Smith’s career and insists on joining their journey into the heart of America’s war. Between the four of them, Jessie is the only one who seems troubled by the carnage they encounter. The others encourage her to toughen up — you’ve got to do what you’ve got to do to get the story. Every atrocity they encounter is an opportunity. At one point, Jessie asks Smith whether she’d snap a photograph of her if she was gunned down. “What do you think?” Smith replies.
Garland’s film is less Welcome to Sarajevo, Michael Winterbottom’s gripping Bosnia drama about a reporter whose conscience leads him to help a refugee girl make it to safety, and more Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler, the dark thriller that shows protagonist Louis Bloom (Jake Gyllenhaal) as a journalistic voyeur preying on grisly crime scenes. In other words, Garland seems less intent on sparking a debate about our current national political polarization into two tribes all but ready for war and more on about how the press covers conflict. This is probably saner and less unhealthy, though also less fun.
What that leaves viewers of Civil War with is a different set of questions than the one they probably walked into the theater with (who would win, the Mountain West or Appalachia?). Should journalists drop dispassionate reporting and pursue “moral clarity” about the things they report about, as reporter Wesley Lowrey has argued, or does that risk a slide into “post-journalism” that undermines reporting in lieu of advocacy, as former CIA analyst Martin Gurri has bemoaned? The debate about journalistic objectivity has roiled the industry I spent my life in, and the protagonists of Civil War seem to be of the old school: They’re not going to get involved with what’s happening in front of them, no matter how desperate things seem.
Joel, in particular, seems almost excited by the carnage he’s witnessing. After embedding with a group of fighters who end up executing their surrendered opponents, all he can do is brag about what a “rush” the experience was. You can almost imagine Gyllenhaal’s creepy smile in place of Moura’s. Garland seems to be telling journalists that we are too eager to report on horrors without doing anything to stop them.
Despite the fact that it isn’t quite what it was marketed as being, I thoroughly enjoyed Civil War — its tight direction and strategic use of violence to shock audiences’ consciences make it well worth watching. But Garland’s missive aimed at my industry left me torn. As a journalist, I’m sympathetic to old-fashioned notions of journalistic objectivity. But as a Georgian and as an American, I treasure this land too much to be an impartial observer as rising polarization and partisan animosity threaten our social fabric. On the one hand, the blurring of reporting and opinion has been a disaster for the country. It’s led to more polarization and less trust in the mass media. I think reporters should generally stick to reporting the facts.
But I don’t think I could stand by as my country was disintegrating and maintain objectivity — nor could I watch an atrocity occur before my eyes that I had the power to stop because it was supposedly my professional obligation to do so. I watched Civil War at a theater in downtown Atlanta. The city was once a casualty of America’s last civil war; 3,000 buildings were burned to the ground, a sort of opening ceremony for Gen. Sherman’s “March to the Sea.”
All around the state I live in, you can see the legacy of the Civil War. From roads named after Confederate generals to the rebel flags you still see flying in more rural parts of the state, it can appear to an outsider that Georgia never got over its defeat 150 years ago. But if Confederate President Jefferson Davis could stare down from his perch on Stone Mountain’s carving, he would see a diverse crowd of Georgians from every ethnicity and walk of life, something that would’ve been unimaginable in his day.
While Georgia has its share of hothead lawmakers, its politics have started to depolarize. A black pastor who leads Martin Luther King Jr.’s former church and a millennial Jewish man serve as the state’s Democratic senators, and an avowedly pro-life Republican governor enjoys the approval of nearly 70% of the state. This situation causes conflict, and media like to zoom in on it in a way that gives the impression that the Old South is, if anything, worse than ever — conflict and doom, after all, pump up the emotions that drive reader engagement.
But the situation itself, if you zoom out on it, is actually the result of a changed and changing people who hold a range of convictions and perspectives, all sharing a home and using the political system to adjudicate the disagreements they can’t otherwise solve. It is that picture that mostly makes me laugh off the notion of a looming new American civil war as something other than a fun fictional premise for a Hollywood film. The only risk of American crackup that really worries me is the thing I’m glad to be surprised Garland’s movie is about: the long-term effects of an American mass media that isn’t thoughtful enough about how it wields its awesome power.
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Zaid Jilani is a freelance journalist.
