A review of the stunning new film “Civil War”
Written and directed by the British Alex Garland, this action-thriller was not what I was expecting.
Sure, it’s a war movie – very much an anti-war movie – but there is no explanation for the war and the apparent cause (a secessionist alliance between the states of California and Texas) makes no sense, while there are no battle sequences, only a series of taunt and ultimately bloody encounters.
It is a road movie in that four characters seek to traverse a war-torn America, travelling from New York to Washington DC, but the travellers are not soldiers but reporters and the purpose of their immensely risky enterprise (an interview with the President) seems ridiculously impossible and even meaningless.
This sense of the absurd grows in strength as the film develops so that, by the end, I saw the narrative as a kind of parody with elements of both “Apocalypse Now” and “Dr Strangelove”. War makes no sense and reporting on it objectively is impossible. In the end, looking for the great shot or the snappy quote, makes the reporters complicit in the madness of it all.
So this is a genre-confusing work but it is brilliantly executed – always captivating, often very tense and scary, and visually arresting (a scene with a forest on fire is almost dreamlike).
Garland has written that his movie is intended to be “an attack on political polarisation” which makes it frighteningly contemporary. Perhaps nowhere is this sense of polarisation captured better than in a chilling scene where one of the reporters, in pleading for his life, asserts that he is an American, only to be answered by the gun-wielding solder: “What sort of American?”