Soldiers of misfortune

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This article was published 12/04/2024 (841 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

As the political situation in the United States becomes increasingly fraught and divisive, the release of a movie about an American civil war set in the near future could be seen as an explosive, maybe even irresponsible act.

Civil War is angry, urgent and important, but its explosion is carefully controlled. Viewers expecting a Blue State-Red State smackdown that will fire up their tribal affinities will be disappointed.

English writer-director Alex Garland has constructed a potent warning that forces the audience to confront the horror and waste of war, while deliberately withholding information on the rights and wrongs claimed by either side.

At a key point in Civil War, a newbie photographer talks with the central character, combat-hardened photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst), about how she can remain a neutral observer in the middle of some of the world’s bloodiest conflicts.

“We don’t ask,” Lee says. “We record, so other people ask.”

Garland is recording, dropping us into a chaotic battle zone with an on-the-ground, in-the-moment cinematic approach. It’s up to the audience to do the asking, and viewers will need to tackle some big, difficult questions about the fragility of democracy, the role of good journalism and the ugliest instincts of human nature.

We do find out that the American president, now in his third term, is given to authoritarian rhetoric, but we don’t learn anything about his party affiliation. (Anyone hoping that Nick Offerman, who has only two brief scenes, will do a Trump impersonation will be let down.)

The secessionists include several unstable factions, including the Western Forces, an alliance between California and Texas that’s impossible to imagine under America’s current left-right configuration.

That’s about as much background as we get when we start out in the lobby of a New York hotel with a quartet of journalists who are winding down after covering a protest that turned deadly. Level-headed Lee and her longtime professional partner Joel (Wagner Moura of Narcos), a volatile adrenaline junkie, are planning to head past the front lines and deep into the combat zone to Washington, D.C.

Weary veteran reporter Sammy (Dune’s Stephen McKinley Henderson) thinks it’s a suicide mission but can’t resist going along. Impossibly baby-faced Jessie (Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny), for whom this is all still a big adventure, wangles the last spot in the van.

From there, the film becomes a nightmarish inversion of the all-American road trip. The word “PRESS” printed optimistically on the side of their vehicle soon feels like scant protection — and maybe even a target.

Garland, who is known for working on near-future sci-fi projects that can be both cerebral and visceral (Ex Machina, Annihilation, 28 Days Later) delivers extremely intense battle sequences and some unforgettably horrific images.

There are looters and vigilantes and armed militias and suicide bombers, highways blocked by abandoned cars and corpses hanging from overpasses. There’s a refugee camp administered by a global relief agency. There are war crimes committed on both sides.

In perhaps the clearest image of the war brought home, there’s a burned-out helicopter in the parking lot of an abandoned JCPenney store.

During a surreal shootout at a Christmas-themed amusement park, the journos run into two military snipers pinned down by an armed man in a distant house. Joel wants to know who they’re with and who they’re taking orders from.

“He’s trying to kill us. We’re trying to kill him,” the sniper replies. That’s as much as we ever know.

The war scenes are disturbing, but it’s the quiet moments, when we get to know our four main characters better, that linger.

Garland underlines the necessity of good journalism and its commitment to truth-telling while remaining stringently unsentimental about his individual journalists.

Sammy has seen it all. Joel hasn’t seen enough. He gets jacked up by near-death experiences and manages the highs and lows of his job with his very own pharmacopoeia.

Lee, given layers of trauma and toughness by Dunst’s phenomenal work, has a thousand-yard stare that suggests she’s at some kind of mental and emotional brink. That’s why her relationship with Jessie, who resembles her younger self, is so tricky.

Garland, as he shows the embedded journalists on military missions, sometimes takes the audience out of the bloody, screaming, chaotic conflict, making the scene freeze, momentarily, into one of Jessie’s pictures — a still photo in black and white, estheticized and historicized.

He is demonstrating what photos can do — and must do — while also suggesting what they can’t.

Garland, likewise, is testing the limits of the war genre. He gives us the immediacy and awfulness of its violence, but he leaves us to navigate the narrative’s implied political and moral complexities on our own.

alison.gillmor@winnipegfreepress.com