Alex Garland’s filmography is best viewed as if he were two entities – one a screenwriter, the other a director – who have had a tumultuous time together after some initial successes. It’s no secret that I’m a big admirer of Garland’s writing work, with his collaborations with Danny Boyle being among the best films in the director’s career that don’t involve giant shit-and-piss covered Scottish toilets, and even his most routinely-mocked script, Sunshine, doesn’t deserve half of the slander it gets. If there was anything protected, at least at first, from Garland the director, it was the utter competency and thoughtfulness of his craft on the page, exploring relatively heady concepts with an inclusive skill and verve – come for the Oscar Isaac dance sequence you read about in a Vulture review, stay for the digressions into the ethics of “owning” an intelligence, even if it may be artificial. Ex Machina’s never been my favorite of his films, but the two that stand out with what they have in common are adaptations. The first, Dredd, owes a significant debt to Gareth Evans and The Raid, but as far as rip-offs go, it was a fantastic welding of novel narrative structure to a deep (and previously poorly adapted) source material; and the second, of course, is Annihilation. Its author may hate it, but it’s a rich feast for the senses whose mysteries are grounded in character as much as they are in whatever the hell is happening to South Florida to make the wildlife go weird. He is an aesthete – in service of the image, with narrative as an afterthought – and his latest, Civil War, is an attempt to grapple with the gap between his storytelling skill and the various layers of skill involved in the creation of a meaningful and, importantly, ethical image.
It’s also proof that if you asked Garland, the writer/director, to walk and chew gum, he’d take one bite and one step and wind up horizontally on the ground covered in Hubba Bubba. Civil War is as aggressively opaque as its predecessor, Men, was, without the benefits of a lengthy body-horror sequence at the end in which each incarnation of shitty guy you find in your average seaside town in Jolly Ol’ Blighty is rectally birthed from his predecessor. There will be countless people in the lead-up to this who will type into their preferred search engine, “civil war garland spoilers” before going back and putting quotation marks around “garland” to ensure that Captain America and the actual American Civil War stop clogging up the results, and they’re unlikely to find very much. Sensing that the political environment his film would emerge in stateside wouldn’t be too tolerant of profound agitation, either on the left or right, Garland’s war-torn US is vaguely drawn, and its causes, much less its effects, are left to AlternateHistory.com posters who will undoubtedly try to fill in the blanks as a thought exercise. There’s some mention of the president (Nick Offerman, who is in this much less than you think he is) dissolving the FBI and running for a third term as rhetorical first shots fired, but Garland doesn’t care about any of this, with the reveal coming as idle chatter between the character. His primary motivation in splitting up the map in the way he does – and that has been relentlessly teased both as an advertisement by A24 and, in its alternate meaning, by shitposters on Twitter over a California/Texas alliance — seems to be to ensure that our protagonists, a group of war reporters and photojournalists, can make their way down the Acela Corridor from NYC to DC without having to cross through enemy territory.
One might assume that, given the heavy focus on character in lieu of exposition, the ensemble would be more compellingly drawn. There’s Lee (Kirsten Dunst), a legendary war photographer scarred by the corrosive horrors she’s seen across years of combat zone coverage. She’s keenly aware of the dangers of this job, which is why when she meets Jessie (Callie Spanny), a 23-year-old wannabe photographer (who made her way to NYC to escape a father who wanted to pretend there wasn’t a war on back at home in Missouri), at a freshly suicide-bombed aid hand-out, she tells her what most film critics tell anybody who wants to try their hand at the craft themselves – do literally anything else besides this.* Yet, when she emerges from her hotel room the next morning, she finds that her partner Joel (Wagner Moura), a journalist who likes to get a little too toasted at the bar, has invited Jessie and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson, who couldn’t be charming if he tried and is the only member of the ensemble to feel like a real person), a rival of theirs on their road trip.
Lee’s cognizant that this is a terrible idea, and an awful risk for every person in that truck with the “Press” decals on the doors: They’re going to the Front Line – which is actually DC, and not NYC as the poster would have you believe – as the Western Forces, the Cali-Texan alliance as previously mentioned, are on the verge of taking the city. But dumber heads prevail, as they often do in this particular film, and the foursome makes their way across the bombed-out roads and strip malls to try and interview and photograph the President before he’s strung up. And Lee’s right: Jessie is, through no fault of her own, a shit magnet who seems perpetually unable to muster the logic and/or reason necessary to navigate active battlefields (how the hell did she get to NYC in the first place?).
So, as the foursome journey through the Dis-United States of Georgia Parking Lots without an escort, they often find themselves in some hairy places: An office park during a shootout between Federal troops and Hawaiian-shirted militiamen, a car wash converted into an impromptu gallows by the new owners, a sniper battle at a driving range that never had its Christmas decorations taken down, or a brave private named Ramirez defending the Burger Tow- ah, sorry, that’s Modern Warfare 2. All the while, Lee and Jessie begin to bond – the former gives the latter tips on how to frame her shots in the heat of the moment properly, and the latter attempts to remind her elder that she was, in fact, human at some point. But Lee wants to tell the young woman that what she’s signed up for is serious business – something that’s unclear, given how her colleagues act, and that she is too meek and observant to tell anyone directly.
This is a good enough point, given that the veneer of purpose underwrites a lot of actions that would seem directly unethical to any passing observer, but Garland’s too skittish about pissing off his fans at NPR to ever clearly come down on a specific perspective. Doing so would mean presenting the journalists and photographers in a truly skeptical way or offering up the kind of hagiography that typically fails to get proper distribution deals at TIFF despite glowing notices in the trades. So Garland settles on a smothering ambiguity in a bid to make the film about the abstract aestheticization of warfare and violence in media and cinema, which is no small task, given that the entire thing is an aestheticization of modern warfare made for mass consumption.
Yet the problem lies beyond the inherent and oft-stated hypocrisy in trying to make an anti-war film that is still absorbing enough for all compliments of the audience to be satisfied by – try as you might, you still will probably make a spectacle – and in how Garland’s context-free approach deprives us the chance to understand the ethical dilemma he so painfully wants us to consider. Each of those big action scenes, in which the gang finds themselves documenting battles (and, typically, the war crimes that follow), is smash-cut to: He knows that if his characters have to have real conversations to get embedded, he’ll have to write real dialogue, and that dialogue will mean different things to different people, and Fox or MSNBC’s nightly hosts will have something to say about the political nature of his film. This, in turn, would taint the purity of that message – how can these people take pretty pictures of horrible things? – by offering a painfully human explanation.
Maybe it’s for money, maybe it’s for attention, maybe it’s because these people have a strong sense that these events should be publicized now and preserved for future generations, and who knows? There are four of them; perhaps one could have a different viewpoint and be willing to talk about it for a minute or two during those interminable scenes where they’re all sitting in the car. An interjection like this would pop the hermetically-sealed provocation that is Alex Garland’s America and make it into something better or uglier, perhaps a little more frightening and closer to the real issues at the heart of what he’s trying to talk about than depicting an American flag-waving suicide bomber charging into a crowd about to riot for a jug of water. The problem isn’t that Civil War’s politics are centrist; it’s that they’re absent entirely, abandoning the ideas honed and developed by people like Susan Sontag or the Situationists throughout the 20th century about aestheticism and ethics for a tableau of assembly-line terrors. Are we supposed to be shocked and horrified by the Lincoln Memorial catching a stray rocket after four decades of our iconography getting smashed on screen?
Similarly, Civil War fails as a warning of the hazards of a specifically American civil conflict in the modern age. War itself may never change, but the circumstances surrounding it frequently do, and films that imagine hypothetical violence at home tend to limit their imaginations to what they can see on the 24-hour news networks or, if one was truly daring, LiveLeak or other shock sites. Garland is stuck in the same trap, and I don’t fully fault him for it. He appropriates imagery of shattered monuments and urban warfare in a way that I imagine most of us have when picturing the terrors of the world coming home to roost and attempts to endow those scenes with requisite horror and misery to try in an effort to broaden our empathetic horizons. What he neglects, again, are the details. The ruined shopping mall – the perpetual stand-in for American consumerist frivolity – might have had punch if Garland was working in or around when Romero made Dawn of the Dead, as there’s a good likelihood that mall was already dead before that chopper smashed into the parking lot.
The armies of the anti-government forces are organized enough to have heavy weaponry and Humvees transported to them in staging areas, implying that comms and, importantly, proper ranks exist to separate the officers from the masses. The true horror of a modern American civil war would, in truth, be suited for a road narrative like this – a thousand small cells, barely united under confederating terms, armed with whatever they bought at the gun show before the civic center closed for good, stuffed to the gills with combat-experienced counter-insurgency experts who know how to run guerrilla campaigns with the best of them – each town a different story, each street a new horror. That’s to say nothing about the technological advancements that have evolved between this script’s completion and the final product’s IMAX release. What would our country do with the millions of consumer-grade drones sitting in garages?
This is why the focal point of the film (and its advertising) hinges upon a scene in which the older journalists have to negotiate Jessie’s release from a psychopath (Jesse Plemons) in red sunglasses and combat boots who, alongside his fellow soldiers, would want nothing more than to add her corpse to the mass grave he’s filling. It’s the one scene in which Garland comes somewhat vaguely close to crossing his self-imposed DMZ, where xenophobic and nativist politics come to the forefront, and the battle lines are clearly drawn. What is a real American (aside from Hulk Hogan, that is)? Ask a hundred people, and you’ll wind up with a hundred similar yet slightly different answers. In this case, the only opinion that counts is the man holding the gun’s, and this strikes somewhat closer to the heart of the matter – Garland fears that the fault lines in American society will quake and fully rupture, but the problem is that he sees the conflict as a traditional two-sided one, though I’m sure that he’ll claim that there’s context that we just don’t know about to render that judgment moot. What looks on the surface to be a black-and-white political divide is something closer to a kaleidoscopic one, with many of the colors sharing connective tissue, yet in their combinations becoming something radically different (would you call green a shade of yellow?). Once the ending rolls around, where Garland hits notes he’s played in every single one of his films since Ex Machina, the generic nature of the entire enterprise comes around to mute whatever sonorous impact these moments might have, and it’s where the thinness of this film’s worldview transitions from irritating to appallingly drawn.
On the other hand, I can’t help admiring Garland and Civil War in one key aspect: It is an impressive sacrifice to spend this much time and money on a film that seems destined to provoke or satisfy so few. Seeing the vast divide in US politics, he made a movie that would unite Americans of all stripes in their frustrations with it, either from not seeing their own beliefs reflected in the thematics or for seeing it as the dull attention-grabbing provocation that it really is (and normally A24 waits until the dead of summer to drop a disappointment with a strong logline to at least try and win a weekend at the box office). In short, he’s made a modern-day “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” where the solution to getting left and right to talk or agree on anything is to find a common cause, and in this case, it’s on how much this unimaginative and vapid movie sucks.
(*I didn’t follow this advice, and neither should you if you’re so inclined.)