Rating: R | Runtime: 109 minutes
Release Date: April 12th, 2024 (USA)
Studio: A24
Director(s): Alex Garland
Writer(s): Alex Garland

[My dad is] sitting on his farm in Missouri pretending like none of this is happening.

There’s truly no more damning line throughout Alex Garland’s very good Civil War than that … except maybe when Lee (Kirsten Dunst) tells Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) her parents are doing the same in Colorado. Not because it holds either character up as a hero for refusing to put on blinders. Not because it prejudges those who steer clear of the fight as being cowards either. It’s simply because the state of society in the twenty-first century has demanded that we become numb in order to survive.

Technology didn’t flatten the world and bring us together with shared empathy for our fellow man. No, it divided us further. It allowed us to point fingers and call names with a louder megaphone. To misconstrue visuals of cultural events and traditions from foreign places as being antithetical to our own rather than of parallel importance. It gave evil and chaos a platform to brainwash and rally tribes of armed sheep ready to kill anyone they deem inferior because they believe doing so will somehow earn them a reward that never comes.

It’s why Garland can only tell this story through the eyes of the most objective participant possible: journalists. That doesn’t mean they are objective. There’s a reason they fear driving through states still loyal to the American government’s president (Nick Offerman) and why they can embed themselves with Western Front rebel forces. Those who miss the point (conservatives) will say that it’s because the mainstream media is liberal and thus aligned with “the liberal enemy.” But reality proves it’s the fact that truth—the thing real journalists seek to uncover and disseminate—often sides with the oppressed.

Is the result therefore political? You bet. Not in the sense that it picks a side beyond the implicit need to show a victor by following the usual blueprint for these types of citizens vs. authority conflicts, but because it dares to reveal that truth. Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) isn’t lying when he tells Lee and Joel (Wagner Moura) that the media is considered the enemy by the White House. They are the ones showing the people what it is the president and his government are doing. They shed the light on the injustices that he and his followers lie about and say aren’t happening. If it weren’t for them, maybe the Western Front never realizes it has the numbers and power to secede.

As for the more superficial nature of Garland’s script, I’d compare its genre and tone to the Purge series before I would a war movie. The way he puts “good” people on the road to survive uncertain and unchecked carnage is pretty much the same besides there being less gory violence and a much longer time period with which to be afraid. Lee and company find themselves in war zones, towns shrouded beneath a veneer of peace, hostile territory with wild cards protecting their property from whomever dares to trespass, and militiamen (Jesse Plemons) taking matters into their own hands.

There’s some great suspense and a perpetual sense of looming terror. Characters we learn to love die en route and others find themselves staring down the barrel of a gun, if not pulling the trigger (figuratively speaking). And in the end it all comes down to the mindset that this danger and the consequences risked are worth it. That if one of them falls, another will take their place so the truth won’t be expunged. It doesn’t mean you must be callous (as Lee likes to pretend she is). It just means you must be ready for whatever happens because the people need to know regardless of whether they ever remember it was you who died to tell them.

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(L-R) Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny in CIVIL WAR; courtesy of A24, photo by Murray Close.