Review of the film Civil War
More of a poignant art film than a popcorn movie, but well worth the journey.
Civil War was a super hip movie. I went in expecting a dystopian action film that would hopefully be painful to watch in a piquant way, but it was both much much worse and also much better than I could have imagined.
It’s not preachy; it offers an unflinching view into the near future, and with plenty of metaphor. For example, California and Texas unite to make up the Western Front. This wouldn’t or couldn’t happen in real life, so what does it mean?
It perhaps means fanaticism is the enemy, with CA and TX roughly emblematic of the two poles of partisan fanaticism against an overgrown central government. In the film the WF plays it straight, but the film suggests on a metaphorical level that the war of the future can best be understood as fanatics versus the entirely disengaged, (or in the case of the President, self-interested vacuousness) with the specific ideologies not nearly as important as extremism and disengagement in general.
The film follows a group of journalists on a cross country vision quest to photograph the taking of the Whitehouse by the WF. Made up of an old veteran journalist on his last legs, a fresh young but talented neophyte with the face of a child, a fun-loving LatAm male, and a middle-aged white heroine. The group’s diversity seems to represent America’s, and that of the audience itself.
And the best way to show the audience a vision of the future is again, metaphorically to depict us as voyeurs or watchers, transports us to the white hot center, the most poignant and important moments of what a civil war means. The film is an attempt to merely show our potentially impending civil war and have us bear witness, thus it makes sense to have the protagonists be the press.
The word PRESS, emblazoned on the coats of the main characters seems to have a double meaning in that it isn’t entirely clear or important as to where their reportage will be published or, indeed, why the publishing of it matters in the first place.
“Press” functions more as a verb: to press is to pry, to persist, to demand a level of seeing and knowing, which is what the audience of the film ostensibly wants. We long to be taken into the gritty, bloody belly of the beast of this Civil War as a kind of guilty pleasure or perverse wish fulfillment.
In Civil War, what we find instead are not guilty thrills but an eerily familiar hellscape that has repeated itself throughout the ages. We can’t help but recognize it in our bones. Its tiresomely macabre arc is etched in our genetic memory, instantly recognizable. And with it, a stark reminder that the line between order and chaos is tenuous.
There’s an irrefutable and plausible depiction of over-boiling resentments that seem sadly familiar instead of outrageous.
We feel embarrassed watching because we know it’s not far afield from a fair depiction of our natures when facing extreme circumstances (that we ourselves helped create) and yet until the hazardous recipe finally over-boils, we tend to blithely proceed as if I’m okay, you’re okay, and everything is lovely and civilized.
We shouldn’t be surprised when at long last the war comes. Like any war itself, the movie is both over-the-top and yet all-too recognizable and understandable, which is what makes the film a work of art; perhaps even a great one.
If the filmmaker’s intent is to issue a warning or plea, he does so halfheartedly at best, aware of the futility of doing so, but also aware of the futility to repress our reflexive instincts to solve the problem, which is what makes the film especially sad and a clarion call for honest introspection, or even a new kind of honesty.
The main character at one point makes it clear that her whole career of photographing the horrors of war was naively purpose-driven by the message she hoped to convey to the public: “don’t do this,” and yet, she says, after all that sincere effort, “here we are.” Bearing witness doesn’t seem to stop anything, knowing seems futile, and yet we still want to know.
The film challenges the viewer by saying, oh, you want to know what goes on? Here you go. Now what, wise guy? Now you know. But what you probably don’t know is why you want to know, since it arguably does exactly zero good in the end.
It’s not hyperbole to say we are probably going to have an American civil war someday, and it could look a lot like this movie, which while it seems bizarre and dystopian when applied to the U.S., the film’s goings-on resemble dozens of civil wars that have happened in the past century. Why would we be so arrogant as to assume America is immune to the macro cycles of war and peace that catch up to all other empires eventually?
The message, if anything, is don’t be a fanatic, and help fight fanaticism however you can; don’t expect it to be pretty, but don’t flinch either, be honest and see what’s happening, because every bit of info may help humanity the next time around; and if all else fails, you may as well die doing what you love. There are many worse ways to die. All good medicine as far as life lessons go.
In one chilling scene a clearly racist white militia man, creepily relaxed and numb with hate is executing members of the press at point blank if they are not the “right” kind of America in some hard to articulate way that’s both perplexing and yet somehow obvious on a gut level, especially as he unceremoniously kills the ethnic, non-white immigrants in the group.
He then turns to the youngest photographer in the bunch and asks where she’s from. Through her tears and horror she manages to say Missouri. He says “Ah the Show-Me state! Do you know why it’s called that?”
She doesn’t. He tells the group that this lack of knowledge, in and of itself, couldn’t be more American; and he lets her live.
In a sense, the movie is calling out the fact that we, the audience, are part of a “Show-Me state” whose origins we don’t understand. After all, we pay good money to be SHOWN a civil war.
Yet we have no idea why we want to be shown in such grave detail, or what that says about us, other than that “nothing is more American” than being clueless about the origins of what could be considered pathologies.
Our comeuppance occurs when we are shown something deeply challenging and not at all the popcorn movie we were expecting. Every frame seems to bludgeon us with the self-evident proposition that we have a long way to go as a species before we figure out this whole “peace” thing.
Peace is earned and fought for through diligence and activity. A society of passive, detached hedonists who have become increasingly lonely, hungrier for armchair outrage and drama than ever before, is not the recipe to protect national peace.
Civil War is the one film that seems to suggest it’s far too late for us to change course and that perhaps the best we can hope to do is bear witness, capture the proceedings on film as accurately and poignantly as we can, and hope it provides enough cautionary gravity to help future generations do a bit better.
On the other hand, it’d be nice to hope that perhaps we can take something away from Civil War that will help us now.
The film challenges us to decide. It’s not holding its breath — it seems to have little faith in our ability to hold it all together in the coming years.
The film seems to insinuate a lack of faith in humanity. This is perhaps intentional, an inspired artistic choice, as it serves to make the challenge to our better angels echo in our minds long after the credits roll.