By Sandra Hall
CIVIL WAR ★★★
(MA15+) 109 minutes
It’s hard to believe writer-director Alex Garland began work on his script for Civil War a year before the attack on the US Capitol in 2021. The Trump presidency and its polarisation of American society were enough to get him started on a scenario centring on the presence of a dictator in the White House.
Then, along came the events of January 6, and the totally implausible became a valid piece of near-futurism.
Kirsten Dunst stars as Lee, a photojournalist travelling across a war-ravaged US to interview the president, in Civil War.
A greater leap of the imagination is the narrative twist that has California, a traditionally liberal Democrat fiefdom, forging an anti-government alliance with the staunchly Republican state of Texas under the banner of “Western Forces”. There are other groupings, including a bundle of seemingly diverse regions that team up as the Loyalist States, but the details are left for us to sort out.
We spend the film in the company of a small party of journalists whose progress across the country is so packed with the horrors of war that most of their energies are concentrated on surviving. Never mind about political analysis or the workings of journalism, for that matter. Two of the group take lots of photographs, but nobody ever talks about writing or filing a story about the atrocities they’re witnessing in a gory close-up.
Kirsten Dunst, cast as Lee, a much-admired photojournalist and her colleague Joel (Brazilian actor-director Wagner Moura) want to get from New York to Washington because Joel has an urgent desire to interview the president. Their mentor and journalistic rival, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), has hitched a ride with them because he wants to get to the war’s front line in Virginia, and Jessie (Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny), a young photographer aspiring to get a start in war reporting, has persuaded them to let her tag along. Nobody talks about taking sides. Sammy sums up the state of play when he says that the rebel forces are so divided that they’ll probably try to kill one another off should they manage to gain power. So much for democracy.
Garland’s real interest is in the spectacle of war. The film is screening at IMAX cinemas, among others, and it certainly succeeds in catapulting you into the midst of the conflict. It’s anarchy out there, and every stranger is a potential killer. In their few days on the road, the group see evidence of lynchings, get caught in ambushes and stumble into the crossfire of street corner battles. Jesse Plemons, wearing combat fatigues and a bizarre pair of pink glasses, is particularly alarming as a trigger-happy, white racist rebel. Then comes the climax, which takes place in Washington, evoking potent memories of January 6, with its assaults on some of the nation’s most revered monuments.
Implicit in Dunst’s performance is the film’s line on the profession of war reporting. Seemingly a study in hard-bitten objectivity, Lee gradually opens up to reveal the ghosts who haunt her when the pressure is off. It’s a grimly candid portrait of the addictive excitements of the job and the cost they can exact. And it almost makes up for the implausibility of everything else the film says about journalism. But not quite.
Civil War is released in cinemas on April 11.
Find out the next TV, streaming series and movies to add to your must-sees. Get The Watchlist delivered every Thursday.