An eye-catching concept disguises a film more about journalistic ethics than politics

Director: Alex Garland

Cast: Kirsten Dunst (Lee Smith), Wagner Moura (Joel), Cailee Spaeny (Jessie Cullen), Stephen McKinley Henderson (Sammy), Nick Offerman (President of the United States), Sonoya Mizuno (Anya), Jefferson White (Dave), Nelson Lee (Tony), Evan Lai (Bohai), Jesse Plemons (Militant)

A third-term President (Nick Offerman) speaks to an America torn apart by Civil War. It’s an attention-grabbing opening but actually, in many ways, politics is not the primary focus of Civil War. Rather than a state-of-the-nation piece, Garland’s punchy work is a study of journalism ethics. Should journalists have any moral restraint around the news they report? Civil War covers the final days of its fictional civil war, as four journalists – celebrated photo-journalist Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and her reporter colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), veteran correspondent Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and would-be war photography who idealises Lee, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) – travel to Washington in the hopes of capturing the photo (and interview) with the President before his defeat.

Perhaps worried about accusations of political bias, Civil War keeps the causes of its war – and, often, even which sides we are interacting with at any given moment – deliberately vague. There is a throwaway reference to Lee having gained fame for a photo of “the Antifa massacre”, phrasing which doesn’t tell us if Antifa were victims or perpetrators. California and Texas – unlikely bedfellows to say the least – have allied to form the Western Federation. We learn nothing about the President, other than casual name-checks comparing him to Gaddafi (he does vaguely resemble vocally, in his brief appearances, Trump). But so universal are the politics of Civil War it could, without changing a thing (other than wifi access) be as easily set in the time of Clinton or Reagan as Trump and Biden.

Instead, Garland’s point seems to be more if there was a civil war in the Land of the Free, the chaos we could expect to see would be no different than the chaos that has occurred in any number of other locations. On their journey, the journalists encounter UN-run refugee camps, lynch mobs, summary executions, street-by-street fighting, mass graves of civilians and a collapse of anything resembling normal life. We’ve seen the same sort of images countless times on TV, and it matters not a jot that the backdrop now are the streets of DC rather than, say, Mogadishu.

Instead, Civil War becomes the sort of ethical discussion you could imagine in a journalism school seminar. Lee is plagued with troubling memories of conflicts passed, where we see her photographing at intimate range, war crimes, atrocities and shootings without a flicker of emotion. It doesn’t take long for the viewer to find this passive observation of death uncomfortable. It’s something I already felt, watching Lee in the film’s opening photograph a riot over a water truck, camera clicking mere centimetres from civilians laid low by truncheons. When an explosion occurs, her first instinct (after pushing Jessie down to avoid the blast) is to reach for her camera, not to help.

Although showing journalists as brave – putting themselves in harm’s way to bring the readers and viewers at home the truth – Civil War subtly questions the profession of war reporter, people often excitedly pounding the streets alongside killers. Lee’s mentoring of Jessie seems focused less on camera skills, and more on drilling into her the need to disconnect with the world around her. To see herself an observer, whose duty is to record events not to intercede. This boils down to a central idea that Civil War will repeat: if I was killed, Jessie asks, would Lee take the photo? This question becomes the dark heart of Civil War.

We increasingly realise many of the journalists are adrenalin junkies, hooked on the buzz from following in soldier immediate footsteps. “What a rush!” screams Joel after they drive away from a battle that ended with a series of summary executions. Many of the journalists don’t consider they hold any moral connection at all for what happens in front of them. It never occurs to them to attempt to prevent an act of violence or argue against something they see. You start to get the chilling feeling that some of them would as unprotestingly followed the Wehrmacht through the Eastern Front and recorded mass executions with the same emotional disconnection.

The journalists also have a cast-iron belief in their own inviolability, believing the simple waving of their press badge will be guarantee them safety. This delusion is seriously shaken by an encounter with a terrifying, mass-grave filling soldier played by a dead-eyed chill by Jesse Plemons. Even in the tragic aftermath of this, Joel’s grief at the loss of friends and colleagues is also tinged with regret that their potential missing of a crucial story means it was also all for nothing.

Only Lee – an excellently subtle performance by Kirsten Dunst, with the flowering of doubt and regret behind her eyes growing in every scene – shows any growing sense of the ghastly moral compromises (and even collaboration with the grisly things they witness) the journalists have made. It makes an excellent contrast with the increasingly gung-ho and risk-taking Jessie (an equally fine Cailee Spaeny), who becomes as hooked on the adrenalin rush of combat as Joel is.

Garland explores all this rather well under his flashy eye-catching concept. The film is shot with a grimy, visceral intensity – punctuated frequently with black-and-white freeze frames showing Lee and Jessie’s photos, which reaches a heart-wrenching climax for one pivotal scene. Interestingly it’s the dialogue and plotting that sometimes lets Civil War down: its character arcs verge on the predictable and the characters have a tendency to fill themselves in on events with on-the-nose journalism speak.

Civil War culminates in a well-staged gun battle towards the White House in Washington that, like much of Civil War’s America-based concept is about the shock of seeing these things “happening here” rather than in a land far away “of which we know nothing”. But this teasing of a political comment disguises the film’s real intent, a careful study of the moral complexities of reporting horrors rather than stopping them, of becoming so deadened to violence a friend’s death becomes a photo op. Civil War might be one of the most subtle questioning of journalistic ethics ever made, presenting it not as an unquestionably noble profession but one of moral compromise and dark excitement-by-proxy at death and slaughter.