I cannot recall a more depressing movie that I have ever seen than Civil War.  What a downer.  It should have been titled The Fall of America or something as equally pessimistic about the future, because that’s what it is.  Pure pessimism.  The film takes care not to play politics, but it doesn’t matter.  It is a diatribe about the state of the Establishment and seems to revel in the need for revolution.  It’s a tough watch.

Alex Garland’s movie posits that secessionist rebels from Texas (perhaps the reddest state) and California (perhaps the bluest state) have garnered their forces to fight back against federal authority, heading toward a showdown in Washington D. C.  It’s been going on for a while, but the Western Forces (WF as it is called) are closing in on the capital and a small but sturdy group of journalists is hoping to interview the president before he is executed.  We follow the journalists from New York through rural New Jersey, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Virginia as they circle toward their goal, watching Americans kill Americans every step of the way.

What I was hoping to see was some sort of overview of a country being ripped apart by partisan politics, hopefully being held together by the compassionate acts of people who put country ahead of politics.  What I got was a mostly non-political horror show of urban warfare and rural vigilantism.  Clearly the film is trying to depict divides so deep that people are ready, sometimes eager, to kill others so easily, but it never explores the psychology of those divisions.  And the journalists who we follow don’t help matters.  They try to remain objective, stay out of the way, and photograph everything very artfully.  But they (Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson and Cailee Spaeny) never actually transmit any of their coverage to any news organization that I could spot, and their documentation frequently puts them in harm’s way, again and again, mostly for dramatic purposes.  Journalism is not treated well in this movie and that’s a shame because it has always been important to document and convey the truth about matters.

While the film is impressively mounted in terms of its battle scenes and sense that nowhere in America is safe any more, it also takes its time to build its characters and to stage the quieter moments when those characters need to process what they have witnessed.  All of that is to the good.  But ultimately the film has no balance.  By the end it is clear that the revolution is necessary and will only be complete when the government’s figurehead (Nick Offerman, in this odd case) is proven to be the callous coward that an offending leader is expected to be.  Civil War isn’t exploring the possibility for such a national calamity; it’s calling for it as the natural way of things.  ☆ ☆.  27 September 2024.