At no point in Civil War, Alex Garland’s new film about a second American civil war, do we learn why anyone is fighting or what they’re fighting for. We are given absolutely no sense of who is good or who is bad; no sense of who we should be rooting for.
Many have used this to criticise the film. They argue that it takes a dangerous both-sides-have-a-point approach that’s inappropriate in a post-Trump America. But I think that’s missing the point. The film is itself a critique of impartiality and both-sidesism, and in particular a critique of the kind of journalism that leans that way.
(the rest of this contains spoilers)
The reason we never learn who’s in the right is because our protagonists — all of whom are journalists — do not care who is in the right. Their politics are completely opaque to us, and it’s heavily implied that they don’t have any at all (beyond “war is bad”). For the entire movie, the only thing these people care about is getting a good story and a good picture. The journalists are just in this for the drama; what’s actually at stake is irrelevant to them.
I view this as a damning indictment of horse-race, so-called “objective” journalism: journalism which refuses to stand for anything, which just sits back and documents what’s happening without making any claims on what should be happening. Civil War goes out of its way to to show us just how repellant this approach is — whether it’s the glee in Jessie’s eyes as people get murdered on every side, or the psychopathic Joel losing his mind when it appears the war might have finished before they’ve had the chance to report its conclusion.
I’ve seen some people describe this film as a love letter to journalism (particularly war journalism), but I think that couldn’t be further from the truth. Civil War is, in my view, the most anti-journalism film since Nightcrawler. One thing that’s particularly telling is that it never makes any attempt to show that the journalists’ work actually matters. In fact, it goes out of the way to show the sheer absurdity of the work, at one point showing us a live broadcast in the middle of a firefight which is clearly not in any way journalistically valuable beyond the shock value. The implication we’re left with is that these people’s work does not matter. Towards the start of the film Kirsten Dunst’s character explicitly spells this out, musing out loud on how, despite her hopes, her work photographing atrocities abroad has failed to deter violence at home. Her entire career, she realises, has been for nothing. And by the end of the film, her pursuit of the shot has still achieved nothing — other than her death. (That death is caused by Jessie, who starts the film off as almost-human but by the end has morphed into a unfeeling psycho utterly unaffected by the death of her mentor.)
Civil War is, on my reading, a film that despises journalism-as-entertainment, and especially despises it when it masquerades as something highbrow. It argues that journalism which treats politics as a game or a contest does everyone a disservice by ignoring the substantive issues — not just whether one side is winning, but whether one side ought to win, morally speaking. It shows us, viscerally, how journalism is all too willing to chase drama and lurid details, despite how little any of that matters (beyond titillating us). And it shows how such an approach is terrible not just for the wider world, but for the journalists who end up debasing themselves for it.
Essayant 