Alex Garland’s Civil War is not just a story told from the point of view of journalists, which would be taxing enough. It’s a movie about journalism, which is a hilariously narrow and tedious preoccupation for a movie that’s nominally concerned with present-day civil conflict.
But it’s ironically very fitting: reporters spent four years playacting as valiant rebel war correspondents in Trump-occupied America. They’re bracing for the possibility of another term. Civil War takes their histrionic mythos about themselves and portrays it as literal reality.
The movie’s trailer scored an early win last year by revealing just enough cryptic detail about the plot to go viral. Was it a fever dream of Trumpian insurrection? An unflinching depiction of America’s slow-burning constitutional crisis? Was it predictive programming, meant to goad “ultra-MAGA domestic extremists” into doing something stupid and violent so they could be neutralized politically for good? The details of the plot were left just vague enough to generate maximum speculation.
As it turns out, though, there’s not much more to Garland’s narrative than the trailer revealed. Nick Offerman is clinging desperately to a third presidential term. We don’t know how he seized power or why Texas and California’s “Western Forces” are leading the effort to depose him. But we know they’re the good guys because they issue press passes to reporters.
Meanwhile, “they shoot journalists on sight at the Capitol,” explains Sammy, the veteran sage played with grave pathos by Stephen McKinley Henderson. Sammy works for “what’s left of the New York Times” — a line that refers, amazingly, not to the actual self-inflicted collapse of the paper’s credibility but to its persecution by an imaginary autocrat.
That persecution is the real subject of Civil War, which stars Kirsten Dunst as Lee Smith, a hard-bitten photojournalist renowned for her coverage of something called the “antifa massacre.” It’s left purposefully vague whether antifa did the massacring or got massacred, though the nature of Offerman’s regime weighs heavily in favor of the latter.
But Lee’s uncompromising professional standards forbid her from asking who the good guys are. “We record so other people ask,” she tells her young admirer Jessie as they drive south for a life-threatening interview with the president. Lee suffers vivid flashbacks from her time covering foreign conflicts. “I thought I was sending a warning home: ‘Don’t do this,’” she says. “But here we are.”
Of course, there really are brave journalists who risk their lives to get the truth. And there really is sectarian conflict brewing in America that could spill over, God forbid, into something catastrophic. But there are also self-obsessed hacks with main character syndrome who think their own brave exploits should be the lede of every story.
And for a movie that’s supposed to show us something about the state of our fraying union, Civil War sure does spend a lot of time wallowing in the introspective angst of the noble press corp. It all feels a little like when ABC’s Jonathan Karl said that covering indoor Trump rallies during COVID was “like you are taking your family with you to Fallujah.” Garland’s fictional world is basically the same as the one in Karl’s head, where he is the hero of a war epic (and not, for some reason, the soldiers).
In the actual 21st century, the closest we’ve come to widespread civil conflict is the nationwide looting and arson spree of summer 2020, which legacy outlets spent covering themselves in shame. The people who put themselves in harm’s way to get footage of those riots were mostly independent streamers with iPhones, dodging through the scenes of total anarchy that CNN labeled as “fiery but mostly peaceful.”
The renegade online journalist is a figure nowhere to be seen in Civil War, whose heroes all work for Reuters and the New York Times. For a movie that’s supposed to be about the near future, it sure is written as if the media ecosystem hasn’t changed since Watergate.
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Early on, Lee and Jessie photograph a downed helicopter in the lot of an abandoned mall. “It’s gonna make a good image,” Lee says. When Garland pulls back the camera to give us his own artful shot of the scene, we understand who he wants to be: not a commentator but a principled chronicler, the artistic counterpart to Lee and Jessie.
He’s a skilled director, but this posture of neutrality, like that of CNN and Reuters, is a transparently self-indulgent conceit. If journalists and moviemakers actually wanted to do some soul-searching about the part they’ve played in escalating national tensions, they could start there. But I won’t hold my breath.
Spencer Klavan is an associate editor of the Claremont Review of Books, host of the Young Heretics podcast, and author of How to Save the West.