Civil War review: Alex Garland’s latest is borderline irresponsible

Thoughtful, dazzling science fiction is Alex Garland’s bread and butter. He started out as a screenwriter on dystopian films like Never Let Me Go and 28 Days Later, and then made his directorial debut, Ex Machina, a story of tech-bro hubris and cyborg rebellion. His exploration of contemporary technology, gender, and politics should make him the ideal candidate to tackle a film about a modern American conflict: Civil War. Alas.

In Garland’s most ambitious – and biggest-budget – project to date, America has been splintered into factions of roving separatists, and a second civil war has begun. A band of reporters are attempting to reach Washington DC in war-torn streets littered with gunmen, led by the weary Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and her reluctant mentee Jessie (Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny), along with the hard-living writer Joel (Wagner Moura) and veteran reporter Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson).

Various states have become allies – including Texas and California, who make strange bedfellows given their opposing politics – and are descending on Washington DC to storm the White House. Meanwhile, a coalition called the Florida Alliance challenges the supremacy of the California-Texas alliance and war crimes are being committed by all the gun-toting sides.

Cailee Spaeny, left, and Kirsten Dunst in Civil War (Photo: A24 via AP)

It’s hard to fault Garland’s storytelling. His character-driven approach to horrifying battle set-pieces is compelling, occasionally jaw-dropping, and thrilling to watch. He nods to the trauma suffered by his protagonists, but keeps it ambiguous. Spectacles are where his strengths lie: suicide bombers wrapping themselves in the stars and stripes; gushing arterial wounds as whizzing bullets pierce the flesh; innocent bystanders made into mince as tanks roll over.

But instead of a deeper meaning to all this, there’s a void. Dunst’s Lee has a sort of emptiness to her. Perhaps that’s a comment on war journalism and its cynicism, or the hollowing-out that it does to a human being, or neither of these things: maybe it simply an emptiness in Garland’s film. Although his elegantly rendered smouldering bridges and mortar-darkened skies look striking, the film refuses to say anything more than that war is destructive, and that our ability to capture and mediate violent division through our phones and cameras might just be worsening it.

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The visceral and intense imagery Garland mirrors back at us is not only from decades of action-oriented war movies, but also from frontline news coverage and handheld phone footage of real-life street skirmishes between right and left. But Garland pumps the brakes just when you wish he’d take the idea further, or at least take it somewhere less obvious.

The film refuses to explore any political backstory – why did red and blue states become allies, and to what end? How did this war actually begin? And its failure to suggest the actual dangers besetting the US in the lead-up to an election that could well mean the capsizing of democracy feels borderline irresponsible.

Civil War is clearly in dialogue with the horrors of Charlottesville in 2017 and the tear-gas clouds of the 2020 riots. If only its ideas were more aligned to the real-life possibilities the nation faced. Instead, this violent tale of anaesthetised reporters is just a war yarn with a twist.