Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Civil War’ on HBO Max, a Thorny, Provocative and Action-Packed Slice of Speculative Fiction That Offers No Easy Answers

I walked into Civil War (now streaming on Max, in addition to VOD services like Amazon Prime Video) carrying a 10-foot pole: Watching a harrowing slice of speculative fiction exploring the what-could-bes of a deeply divided America feels like too damn much right now. But Alex Garland – writer of 28 Days Later and Sunshine, writer and director of Ex Machina and Annihilation – is one of the current cinema’s most vital filmmakers, and I was relieved to learn that his story plays out in an ideological fog that I’d argue doesn’t take “both sides” as much as it takes no side at all. His narrative decisions inevitably sparked divisive reactions, some admiring its more subtle provocations, some calling it vague and shallow. I stand by the former sentiment; Garland’s vitality remains wholly intact.

CIVIL WAR: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We open on the President of the United States (Nick Offerman) practicing his speech prior to a national TV address. What he says – that the U.S. is defeating the, Western Forces, consisting of united secessionists from Texas and California – sounds, shall we say, unconvincing. Bullshit detectors at full blare. Major fascist-clown vibes. We won’t see this guy again for quite a while, but we will eventually learn that he’s in his third term as president, has disbanded the FBI, ordered attacks on American citizens and ordered journalists at the Capitol to be shot on sight. Do the math. It’s not hard. 

Cut to New York City. Citizens clamor for water that’s being guarded by cops with riot gear. No surprise, violence erupts, and Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) is there to photograph it. She’s a renowned war photographer, and wears the hollowed-out expression of someone who’s seen and now carries way, way too much. In the melee, young photographer Jessie Cullen (Cailee Spaeny) is clipped by a billy club, and Lee whisks the kid to safety. The grizzled veteran – who will soonsit in a bathtub and try to repress traumatic memories while staying at a hotel that absolutely reminds us of the Saigon hotels where reporters commiserate and got drunk during ’Nam  – gives Jessie some advice: get a helmet and some kevlar. It’s the standard-issue uniform for journos these days. Jessie, we learn, aspires to be Lee, who made a name for herself after photographing the “Antifa massacre.” Who exactly was massacred or doing the massacring is left hanging in the air like a bad smell on a humid day.

The two women part ways but will reconvene the next day. Jessie, it seems, has convinced Lee’s partner, Reuters reporter Joel (Wagner Moura), to let her accompany them on their road trip to D.C. Their goal? Interview the president. “Shot on sight” doesn’t scare them, it seems. Lee and Joel already agreed to drop New York Times journo Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), Lee’s friend and mentor, in Charlottesville on the way. Lee’s already not happy about having an old man who walks with a cane tagging along, and now she has to babysit a greenhorn. It’s all over her face and in her tone: God dammit. She reluctantly agrees, and off they go. Subtitle: 857 MILES TO WASHINGTON, D.C. It wouldn’t be a terribly difficult trip if things were, uh, “normal” – why did I use that loaded-ass word? – but as soon as they hit the road we see absolute carnage. Wrecked and burned-out cars line the highways, the interstates are destroyed and you can only imagine how many bodies are lost in the mess. Feel free to speculate about how, exactly, all this happened. One thing is clear, though – in America, chaos reigns.

You won’t be shocked to learn that their East Coast road trip is a journey through hell. They barter with heavily armed men for some gas – 300 highly valuable Canadian dollars. They capture images from a conflict between one group of men and another group of men, embedded in the action and dodging bullets. They stop at a refugee camp where families gather in tents, trying to be happy in the moment. They drive through a small town that’s surreally, suspiciously idyllic, because everyone who lives there has their heads in the sand. They come across a Christmas drive-thru display rendered haunted and deranged by the war, and a sniper puts holes in their SUV; they pull over and take cover and find two other snipers trying to snipe the first sniper. Lee asks them who’s in charge around here. “No one’s giving us orders. Someone’s trying to kill us, we’re trying to kill them,” is the reply. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Apocalypse Now. It’s an obvious one in many ways. I’m not comparing the two films, Coppola’s being an all-timer, and Garland’s being too new and raw and knotty. But goddamn if it doesn’t remind me of Apocalypse Now.

Performance Worth Watching: There’s plenty of buzz around Jesse Plemons’ gruesomely chilling drop-in cameo as a militant, but let’s not lose sight of Dunst’s work here. She’s the broken down and exhausted soul of the movie, playing a character bearing the weight of unfathomable horror; it seems that her quest for journalistic objectivity is the only thing keeping her alive.

Memorable Dialogue: Two purposely decontextualized single-line quotes from different scenes:

A terrifying man with a gun played by Plemons: “What kind of American are you?”

Joel: “I need a quote.”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: How exactly does one wrap one’s head around Civil War? Around its complex and sympathetic but not always flattering portrayal of journalists? Around its intense, brilliantly executed action sequences? Around its horrifying violence? Around its wildly creative needle drops? Around its thinly written characters rendered robust by Moura, Henderson, Spaeny and especially Dunst? Around Plemons’ latest-among-many deeply, troublingly crepuscular representation of psychopathy? Around its stubborn unwillingness to engage in the current political discourse?

It’s the last question that’ll frustrate many, or come as a relief. Count me among the latter group, grateful that Garland shows no interest in telling us what to think and how to think, against our keen interest – whether we choose to admit it or not – in wanting someone to tell us what to think. I find it crucial to our well-being as logic-and-reason-driven humans that we resist the urge to let emotions, e.g. weariness and ennui, dictate our response to something as disturbing as the current American cultural divide. It’s where Garland’s provocations turn away from hammer-to-noggin obviousness to understatement – and let there be no doubt that Civil War is indeed a provocation. There’s no other way a story like this can exist in the current world.

On one level, Garland’s intent is simple: Violence is barbaric, the end result of a devolved manner of thinking. That notion is underscored by the visceral thrills we experience when watching this film’s high-intensity depictions of street-level warfare (an early shootout set to a De La Soul classic is especially gripping; the third-act climax is on par with Full Metal Jacket or Saving Private Ryan, and is among the best action sequences in recent memory). Only after the fact do we question our response to violence on the screen, and that may function as a metaphor for real-life violence as well.

The film’s protagonists, the people witnessing such violence, are more complex, ciphers of sorts for our questions about morality within “objective” journalism. Consider how people struggle to contend with the erosion of journalistic integrity in the face of its purpose as the fourth estate, an entity that serves as a vital check on power. The protagonists of Civil War are in pursuit of what? A good story? The truth? They’re driven by noble intentions, but also by ego, an obsession to get the money shot. The film is driven more by this internal push-and-pull rather than 

Within Dunst’s character is the sense that documenting excessively violent history, especially in the context of a modern American civil war, may be futile, a scream swallowed by an abyss. And she paid dearly – everything about her screams that she’s dead inside. But her other option is to be like her parents, who she says are holed up comfortably in Colorado, pretending that the war isn’t happening. It seems as if Garland is implying that there’s more to the American divide than left vs. right; there’s violent vs. nonviolent, engaged vs. unengaged, delusional vs. truthful. In other words, don’t subscribe to the tidiness of the binary, an idea that Garland embeds into the narrative’s linear, episodic structure. His America – and our own future America, perhaps – isn’t divided into halves that can easily be glued back together. It’s shattered, splintered and scattered and, well, now what?

Our Call: STREAM IT. It’s too simplistic to call Civil War a polemic or a cautionary tale – it’s a smorgasbord of food for thought, its urgent and incisive visual and thematic construction generating a bracing immediacy.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.