UNCIVILIZED 

ALEX GARLAND’S CIVIL WAR (2024) 

Sci-fi storyteller Alex Garland uses different tools to different ends in Civil War (2024).

Picture this: you’re in a ruggedly beautiful, coastal quarantine zone, where strange things are happening, all seemingly related to unexplained biological growth. You’re trapped in an abandoned cabin. Suddenly, you hear a voice – voices? – approach, belonging to a lumbering creature in the shape of the bear, but – it isn’t. It wears a skull resembling more of that of a wolf, but on the outside of its face, and the sound it emits is part bear, and part, unmistakably, human. 

The rushing icy water of a mountainside in Norway followed by the elegant removal of a robot’s mechanical visage. The sighting of a clearly disturbed, pasty man, in an English countryside estate’s front yard, giving birth to – himself. These sounds and images were revelatory in their bizarre originality. This kind of filmmaking is inventive, bold, and in some way, each unique to their own story, new. 

These scenes are all from director Alex Garland’s previous works, including Annihilation (2018), Ex Machina (2015) and Men (2022). These are original works of filmmaking, in which we can sense the writer’s signature, marked by vivid, fearful and yet beautiful imagery, in an otherworldly, sometimes inhumane way. Which is why disappointment began to stir within the first minutes of his latest, and already much haggled over work, Civil War (2024). Somehow I knew we weren’t going to get the same Alex Garland. 

During the press for this film, Garland has talked about stepping back from directing and refocusing on screenwriting, at which his skills are proven and interesting. I do hope he returns to directing, because he’s a distinctive voice in modern cinema. But perhaps a breather ain’t a bad idea. 

Writers across publications, rightly, have wrestled with the politics of this modern national horror story, including about its premise, or lack thereof. In or around our current day, the country is split by several factions, one of which is the reduced federal government, led by a Trump like president in his third term, having proudly achieved such milestones as disbanding the FBI and refusing media interviews for over a year. The major opposing party is the WF, or “Western Forces,” comprising California and Texas. (Garland has also stated that this disruption of expectations and plausibility is by design, to “avoid a quick and lazy read,” as he told the New York Times this week.) A couple of war photographers from Reuters are on a road trip to the White House, for a very different adventure than that taken by middle schoolers across the country. One with more dangerous rest stops and more gruesome photo ops. People are still reading Reuters, apparently, even though Wi-Fi seems hard to come by, power grids are down, and – well, anyway.  

At the helm is Dunst’s Lee, a beleaguered war photographer who got into the game with the hopes of photography having the power to say, “don’t do this.” (This is not Shakespeare, suffice it to say.) She is platonically paired up with Joel, played by Wagner Moura who… wait, what does he do? Besides drive, suck on cigarettes as if they are reverse balloons, and indulge his clearly unhealthy obsession with witnessing violence. I suppose he helps look after Jessie (a spunky Caileey Spaeny), a fledgling photographer who Lee has taken under her wing. Rounding out the team is Sammy, an aging veteran of the war photo game, played by Stephen McKinley Henderson, with the same wisdom and caution on display as in Dune (2021) and other modern films requiring a dutiful sage. 

The squad trods its way from New York to DC, via a very circuitous route due to war related dangers and independent militias, encountering much of the same imagery we have seen for decades. The apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic genre, beginning with The End of the World (1916),  through The War of the Worlds (1953), stretching across the Mad Max series (1979+) and in full force today, is so well worn, it becomes difficult to tell films apart. Are the abandoned roads from Station Eleven (2021) Or The Last of Us? Are these the woods from It Comes at Night or Knock at the Cabin? Is there anywhere down The Road (2009) with A Quiet Place to watch Snowpiercer (2013)? Very few of the images we see here have that feeling of invention, shown to us in Garland’s earlier, more innovative works. Sitting in the multiplex, having ear drums shorn by gunfire via massive speakers, I did think of the modest ingenuity of Leave the World Behind (2023), with its floating oil tanker and crowding deer, as recent exceptions.

Apropos, the only one that hung in my mind from most of Civil War was the sight of displaced, beaten down white Americans trudging down a street through a demolished suburb pushing shopping carts. That is something you see everyday, but typically in countries far from the US. I thought of refugees in Gaza, displaced in the millions, living through a reality far worse, more realistic, more urgent and more serious than this film. The 22 million refugees from Syria. Others from afghanistan. South Sudan. And more.   

There are set pieces that reach for the poignancy of those that came before it. When the team comes upon a Christmas display (unrealistic in its under-production, another sign of a low budget), they come upon snipers firing at a large house. It’s a decent scene – but it was done, and more meaningfully, with texture of characters, in The Bourne Identity (2002). The menacing, dangerous stranger as angel of death was another strong scene, but I was more creeped out by Guy Pearce doing the same, in The Road. This is one of the most talked about scenes, featuring Jesse Plemons (married to Kirsten Dunst), given nothing else from a writing perspective except to be – Jesse Plemons. Even this scene, strong in fear and feeling, felt contrived, as if to give the couple an ironic scene together. 

The cast does what it can with the script, and Dunst is believable as a war weary photographer on what could very well be her last assignment. I recalled her ethereal melancholy from The Virgin Suicides (1999), and noticeably none of the comedic fire she can breathe, on wondrous display in Bachelorette (2022). As Joel, Wagner Moura is energetic, but it’s hard not to think of him in an archetype recently painted by Pedro Pascal in The Last of Us. Perhaps the budget couldn’t accommodate him. Once I learned the total budget was “only” $50 million, I understood why the middle hour or so feels so low budget. 

Other critical components of filmmaking join in their lack of fulfillment. Most needle drops feature a loud rock song that is jarringly out of place (and on the nose), such that they lose the effect of their subversive intentions right away. The schtick got so annoying, I started to tune the tunes out. And it’s hard to weep for these characters’ maladies, because we don’t really know them. Who were they before the war? What formed them? The ending set piece brings us to a militarized Washington, DC, threads of orange gunfire bending over the city, with the requisite monument-distruction-porn, is genuinely disturbing. Our DP (Director of Photography) here is Rob Hardy, of Ex Machina, Annihilation, as well as some of the Mission Impossible franchise, is working hard. But its filming style feels like the casually coined “first person shooter” video game, a glaring and questionable departure in style from the rest of the film. “Machine Guns Rattle Rib Cages” could be its chapter title. 

There is some cleverness in Garland’s mixing up of expectations, plausibility and speculation. Would the film have been more plausible were it California and the US government versus Texas and its rebel cousin, Florida? Sure. But Garland is saying precisely that to not think through all of the possibilities within a nation in a growing polycrisis environment is to invite an apocalypse like what he endeavors to show us. That premise could be interesting. It subverts assumptions and keeps us on our toes. But because the film chooses not to explain it, it’s contrast to current realities becomes a distraction that undermines the story.

And overall –  this is serious stuff. Oscar completists from 2023 will recall 20 Days in Mariupol (2023), in which real war photographers capture real conflict and the real human cost. And I do think it is appropriate to compare them. If you are making a film speculating about war, set in a country where many people fear the possibility of violence due to the grip of a fascist leader over half of its populous, during a real moment of ongoing war within other nations (a list that seems to grow by the day), where violence has already torn through their families and homes and societies – your thinking could perhaps be a bit more thorough, and your message more careful, and pointed. Your position could be more convicted, instead of mussed about, creating and leaving unexplained crucial plot points to throw the audience off the scent of truth of our current day. 

Perhaps Garland was inspired by the success of Jesse Armstrong’s much lauded Succession (2018-2023), an instance of shrewd British observation of an unequivocally American capitalist phenomenon. But in that example, the writing was brilliant, chock full of rich insider specificity, so actual it is dumbfounding how they learned, and then recreated it on screen. In the past, Garland has shown himself to be an imaginative storyteller and an impressive visual artist in the sci fi genre, and his feature filmmaking career is really just getting started. With hope, his next project will steer clear of politics. “Don’t do this,” in reference to Civil War, I’d urge him. “Do this,” pointing to the enigmas of Annihilation and Ex Machina. Return to the vast and mysterious landscape of the unknown. We can imagine certain apocalyptic fates on our own. Show us the possibilities we haven’t yet dreamt of, those strange visions only artists can conjure, of futures no less possible, but rising in the dreams of creators like himself that weld beauty to terror, and surprise to fate.