Civil War Movie Review – Is The End Of The American Empire Worth Watching?

Written by: Ian Firstenberg

Caution: Like the bottles of milk in your fridge, this is all spoilers

In a semi-distant future, rife with partisan divide and automatic rifles, an eclectic foursome of reporters traverses suburban Appalachia to document the killing of the President. Two of five stars.

That’s Civil War, the recent action drama from A24 directed by Alex Garland, in a nutshell. I included my Letterbox’d rating because I feel it’s objectively correct. At just over 100 minutes, the overwrought prediction of the coming divide betwixt the country folk and the city folk lands flat.

Kirsten Dunst stars as the seasoned veteran photojournalist, Wagner Moura serves as her writer partner, Stephen McKinley is the old-timer trying to notch one last break and Cailee Spaeny plays the naive photographer from the Show-Me state, looking to make it big. There are some additional, albeit brief, performances from Jesse Plemons as a violent right-wing militaman in heart shaped sunglasses and Nick Offerman as the authoritarian three-term president.

As an aside, the husband/wife pairing in a movie makes me wonder a bit. Did Dunst put in a good word for Plemons here? While I’m sure everything is played above board and fairly in Hollywood, it always gives me pause.

To speed run through the plot and setting: it’s an unspecified future where the Western Forces — made up of secessionist states Texas and California — are the good guys fighting against the tyrannical American government. It’s not super clear how all this secession went down or why Texas and California would link up like some kind of Hippy Hoedown 90s buddy comedy but that’s not the point.

The point is that journalism is important and that we’re all just too divided. Or at least that was what Garland seemed to be fumbling for with this chaotic, bloody, paranoid prediction.

Dunst, Moura, McKinley and Spaeny embark the 800+ miles from the Big Apple to D.C. to try and get an interview with the dang president. They encounter some crazy right-wing psychos with guns at a gas station, a crazy right-wing sniper firing at them from a McMansion in rural Pennsylvania. The aforementioned Plemmons and more right-wing nuts before joining the storming of the Capitol (the good kind!) with the Western Forces.

McKinley’s character dies saving Dunst, Moura and Spaeny from Plemmons, who plays a particularly freaky right-wing psycho with a gun. Dunst’s character dies saving Spaeny from secret service gunfire in the White House.

That came at the end and truly pissed me off. Slow motion shot of Spaeny sliding into gunfire, kneeling down to get the perfect picture. Flash down the hallway as one of the secret service men lines up a shot.

Dunst realizes and jumps in front, knocking Spaeny down. Spaeny catches Dunst’s last seconds of life drifting away in black-and-white as the seasoned photojournalist dies noblely in the White House.

A female sergeant in the Western Forces shoots the President in the Oval Office as a black-and-white still (presumably shot by Spaeny’s character) rolls into the credits.

I had a few sticking points with this movie but there were some fun parts which is a good place to start.

For one thing, the music choice was solid. All very good songs that are enjoyable in movies, though not in this one. The use of the songs felt forced and disingenuous as though they were focus group tested to ensure the appropriate emotional response. Jesse Plemmons, America’s favorite leading man on Ozeympic, absolutely kills in this one. He is on screen briefly before getting walloped by a suburban into a mass grave, but is electric in his five minutes.

Additionally, it’s always fun to see the American military, or American government, accurately portrayed as the bad guy which this did to some degree. It’s also cool to watch the president get shot.

And, that’s about all from me in the positives.

Dunst, Moura and Spaeny see monstrous torture, gut-wrenching destitution and gory battles while staying mostly calm enough to get the pictures that they send (not sure how considering there’s no WiFi) to some assignment desk somewhere.

The details are not fleshed out. Really no details of this movie are fleshed out. It’s all broad strokes and foreground shots, which is cool enough. Garland was ambitious. He wanted it to be a hard-hitting, bloody look at how divided we’ve all become through the two-tier vision of a cynical photojournalist and a doe-eyed photographer.

I respect the ambition and I’m quite sure that plenty of NYT or WaPo reporters wish that they’re lives were like that. But they’re not. We’re not on the precipice of some insane civil war and if we were those reporters would do the same thing they’ve done for years, ignore until they can’t and then frame it all as a failure of both sides to be sufficiently tactful and moderate.

It’s what the biggest publications did during Iraq, it’s what they’ve done in Gaza. It’s what they’re designed to do. While there are some solid reporters at the papers of record, the highest levels of the publications are not staffed with people you would deem gusty or morally righteous, but sanctimonious and entitled.

All that said, it was cool to watch the corrupt President get shot.