"Civil War" Uses Journalism as a Mechanism for Abstaining

Alex Garland attempts to explore the search for truth but instead fails to take a stance

Disinterest in the political status quo, specifically the mechanisms that regulate the system, is a developed political instinct itself: apoliticism is a component of contemporary politics. In Alex Garland’s Civil War, political agnosticism is not predicated on indifference — rather, it is played as if it is noble, feigning superiority by rising above divisiveness and partisanship. The film creates a post-January 6 imagination of an apocalyptic, divided America, but refuses to flesh out the political or social context that fractured the country. The film justifies its barren politics by using them as a vessel to explore objective journalism, abandoning any explicit political or social stance in search of the truth.  

Civil War follows a team of reporters and photographers making their way to Washington D.C. in hopes to interview the president (Nick Offerman), after “The Western Forces,” a well-organized army whose history and purpose are not fully described, are in the process of succeeding and the country is embroiled in civil war. Our perspective on the journey to the capital is framed by the experience of two photojournalists — an experienced war photographer, Lee (Kirsten Dunst), and an ambitious newcomer, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). 

By using photojournalism as a tidy (and convenient) means of visualizing a story, Civil War is poised to explore the impossible obligation of neutrality and the extent to which maintaining journalistic integrity is a useless and paradoxical exercise when reporting is treated as a product. But Garland does not consider these questions for long, instead using journalism mainly as a mechanism for abstaining, a way of forgoing any ideological commitment with the guise of integrity. The film manipulates any engaging conversation on the ethics and exploitation of capturing an image to posture timid politics about the violence humans are capable of.

Civil War comes close to developing a thesis at times, mostly due to all-around stellar performances that deepen the otherwise vapid narrative. Dunst and Spaeny both effortlessly capture how the search for “the shot” creates a sensationalized fantasy, making it increasingly difficult to frame the situation without fetishizing the subject. But rather than giving both actors breathing room to interpolate these realizations, Garland forces heavy handed devices into what should be patient moments. Jessie, naive and young, shoots on black and white film, while Lee, experienced and jaded, captures her images in color — catch the metaphor?

Civil War is closest to being productive when it considers the violence inherent in the shot — how different is it from a gunshot when it's immediately weaponized to exacerbate American fears? — but the film loses all its momentum because it is ultimately only interested in being a thought experiment, a hypothetical about an apocalyptic future America.

But all of Alex Garland’s images are not hypothetical — burning cities, bombings, and mass graves are facts of everyday life, specifically for Palestinians in Gaza  — and many of those who document them are not professionals who place themselves in these environments. Palestinians are forced to be the documentarians of their own genocide, a circumstance which Garland does not recognize in his fantastical apocalypse. Images can be weaponized to justify intense violence, but they also allow for a reclamation of one’s story. Garland may have succeeded if he had instead focused on the immense power of being able to dictate an image, rather than forming a half-baked meditation on the tangibility of objectivity. 

Promising ideas are simply pawns in Garland’s pretentious moral exercise that declares that complete noncommittal to any relevant ideology is a noble artistic endeavor. By displaying effect after effect while never condemning or even identifying a cause, Civil War implies that conflict reporting is blind to politics, a simple observation of facts with incredible distance to morals and ideology. 

OVERALL SCORE: 5/10

Civil War was released on April 12, 2024, and is currently streaming on Max.