Review of the movie Civil War

Someday, future generations will discuss the significant events of the twenty-first century and say that in the 2020s the world was shocked by the war in Ukraine, the war in Israel, the threat of World War III and nuclear conflict… and the release of Alex Garland’s Civil War.

British screenwriter and director Alex Garland started out as a writer. In particular, his novel The Beach received a famous film adaptation with Leonardo DiCaprio. For many years he wrote scripts for other directors, including Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, Inferno). And then he started making films himself (Ex Machina, Annihilation, The Male Genus, the series Design). His stories have always been and remain frighteningly existential, because, in Garland’s opinion, human existence cannot have a happy ending. Although, of course, the phrase “happy ending” is an oxymoron in the context of human civilization, because any ending for our species makes happiness absolutely impossible, and the end will come sooner or later anyway. The sun will go out, a virus will kill everyone, artificial intelligence will reign supreme, antimatter will distort matter… Or, more prosaically, a global war, and not necessarily with the use of nuclear weapons, just mutual hatred will be enough.

It was the war in Ukraine, and this is more than obvious, that inspired Garland to create Civil War, a cautionary dystopia about the second US civil war and the apocalyptic collapse of America, which does not look like a fantasy against the backdrop of the highly probable second coming of Donald Trump, who will absolutize the policy of nationalism and non-interference with the slogans “America for Americans” and “America First”, provoke a large wave of emigration, disorganization of NATO and And it was the photos of the war in Ukraine, the photos of bombed Kharkiv, destroyed Mariupol, raped Bucha… that inspired (if this word is appropriate to use in the sense of arousing negative emotions) Garland to show this film through the “eyes” of a camera, an almost dispassionate recorder of moments in history.

“Come and see,” the author of Rise of the States seems to be saying to all of us. “We” in the sense of all earthlings, not just Americans. Although we Ukrainians don’t have to go far, we can see everything in our own backyard. And here it is impossible not to recall the iconic Soviet-Belarusian anti-war existential film Go and Look by Alem Klimov about Nazi atrocities in occupied Belarus through the eyes of a teenage boy, Flora. Flora walked and watched, and the horrors he saw turned the child into a gray-haired, pale, wrinkled “old man” under a stunning curtain…

Garland’s protagonists, an experienced war correspondent, a war journalist, their old mentor, and a young aspiring photographer, are also walking across the states from New York, detouring through Pennsylvania and West Virginia to Washington, D.C. Or rather, they don’t walk, they ride in a massive jeep with the inscription “press,” and instead of Flora’s eyes, the “eyes” of their cameras. They walk and look at the hanged, the lynched, the tortured, at buildings and entire cities destroyed by rockets, under artillery fire against the night sky, past shooting in broad daylight, at explosions at a distance of several meters, past a mass grave with dozens or even hundreds of civilian bodies, over which a soldier with a machine gun stands (wearing sunglasses with red lenses to ignore the blood or, on the contrary, to see the world around him as a total bloody mess) and filtering, deciding which Americans are “right” and which are “wrong.”

We can say that the role of Flora here is played by a young photographer, the heroine of Kaylee Spaney, who also “ages” in a way at the end. It’s just that since Garland, unlike Klimov, doesn’t resort to surrealism but stays on the path of realism (pseudo-documentary realism, to be more precise), her mental wrinkles and gray hair don’t manifest themselves physically on her face. Her form of aging is hardening, indifference, and dehumanization. So at the end of the movie there is no more trembling, no more numbness, no more loud or silent hysteria, no more shock, no more horror… only the click of the camera.

It doesn’t matter where the good ones are, where the bad ones are, or whether there are any good ones at all. It doesn’t matter who is the author’s target of the greatest criticism: soldiers, civilians, photographers, the president, the government, the government army, the resistance army, fierce fighters, fierce system builders, or fierce ignoramuses who are “out of politics” until the bullet pierces their own forehead, pretending that nothing is happening and life goes on as usual with shopping in stores and coffee in cafes… It is important that man as a species has an exceptional and exceptionally terrible (though vital) capacity for any kind of addiction, the capacity for any kind of adaptation. Therefore, for him, for us, what seemed impossible, unthinkable, intolerable, and unbearable yesterday… is becoming the norm today, becoming commonplace. The red lines, which supposedly represent the edge, the boundary, the perimeter beyond which the unacceptable is located, are constantly and easily moved. And any apocalypse somehow turns into a new normal order, a new normal reality, a new white noise.

There is no doubt that Alex Garland has now released the main film of his career, which should become first the event of the year, then the event of the decade, and then film critics and film scholars of the twenty-second century, nostalgic for previous eras (and who knows what cinema will look like then, and whether there will be screens at all, and whether America, Ukraine, Europe, Russia, and the world in general would exist) and compiling top lists of the most important films, they might say that the twentieth film century is primarily Apocalypse Now, and the twenty-first century is Rise of the States. And after this major film, the director said that he would not make any more films because it was too difficult and exhausting to convince producers of the meaning and potential of unpopular ideas. Garland will return to writing. Maybe he’ll write an unnecessary Beach 2 (he’ll be writing 28 Years Later in the near future). One way or another, he has already done his best for cinema.