The opinions expressed in The Lawrentian are those of the students, faculty and community members who wrote them. The Lawrentian does not endorse any opinions piece except for the staff editorial, which represents a majority of the editorial board. The Lawrentian welcomes everyone to submit their own opinions. For the full editorial policy and parameters for submitting articles, please refer to the About section.
Civil War! American film company A24 certainly raised eyebrows and interest with their announcement of an imagined Second American Civil War film project a couple years ago. There was obviously a lot of controversy, given the political climate and subject at hand. Some released lore was met with guffaws: Texas allied with California? Floridian Alliance? But Alex Garland’s 2024 film chose not to focus on the political causes and motivations that started and drove this Yugoslavia-esque picture of a Second American Civil War, but rather on a group of four journalists witnessing and documenting “in the moment” events in a country that has long forgotten the reason why it’s fighting itself.
The film’s marketing, action, characters and plot focus are, frankly, awful. A lot of marketing shorts advertised it as “the most realistic action seen on screen,” depicting it as some savage, gritty war film professionally consulted on and depicted by A24, but really none of the battle scenes in the film are remotely sensible (it evokes the intro battle of “The Six Triple Eight”). There are a bevy of nonsensical plot holes throughout simply to make the sequence look “cool,” and most of the plot centers around the journalists as they blunder their way to D.C., trying to catch up with the Texan-Californian troops who are going to hang Nick Offerman’s president. I say blunder because these reporters are universally a motley crew of idiots in a world where the idiots should have died off already. They leap into hallways filled with gunfire, consistently interfere with nearby soldiers and, most stupidly, attempt to interview (probably white-supremacist) loose-trigger militiamen filling a mass grave.
But through all that typical movie silliness, there is a hint of terrifying lucidity to the whole film. The meaning of the war itself disappears as more and more people die. A lot of the conflict itself is confused, vague and sometimes nihilistically shrugged off. Most, if not all, of the troops shown wear MultiCam (the official camouflage of countless nations and private groups) with barely any distinguishing features from opposing forces. This is even directly stated in a sniper sequence as two unmarked soldiers try to counter-snipe someone in a long-abandoned Christmas ranch. “Someone is trying to kill us,” a lemon-green haired rifleman murmurs, “and we’re trying to kill him.” We don’t know who Lemon Green and his spotter are fighting for or who they’re fighting against, only that they’re in a life-and-death situation that they need to overcome. Whether shooting their assailant is going to make the country better is an abstraction long forgotten. This is expanded upon later as the protagonist journalists encounter Jesse Plemons’s red-shaded militiaman leader and his group of body-pilers.
The mass grave scene has the infamous line “What kind of American are you?” as Red Shades questions the hapless journalists. It’s a vague nod to a whole plethora of cases in history of wandering wartime thugs. If we go back to our own history, the American Civil War saw pro-Union Jayhawkers and pro-Confederate Bushwhackers committing terrorism in Missouri and Kansas, long before and after the actual conflict. We don’t know what Red Shades’ group represents aside from some definite nativism (“Oh, you’re from China?” he asks a to-be victim), but it’s clear that whatever they represent, they believe bullets are the way to go to make America united again, whatever that America is going to be. There’s a chilling sense that no matter what “I love America” sentiment Red Shades espouses, he’s really in it just to go about nihilistically filling that grave up.
Contrasted with the abandoned towns, highways piled with broken vehicles and occasional refugees, parts of America look relatively untouched — a rather interesting detail I appreciated from Garland. The reporter crew starts out in New York, which, save for several dozen fires, a curfew, snipers on the rooftops of skyscrapers and a suicide-bombing, seems practically in business as war journalists gather in an upkept hotel lobby to discuss their correspondence plans. A town that the protagonists take a brief stop in is an idyllic, quaint paradise overseen by militiamen. In contrast, D.C.’s historic district in the ending segment is leveled as the Texan-Californian forces rush the White House.
There’s also a hidden meta-commentary on the role and psychology of war journalists, unfortunately hidden behind tired archetypes that severely hinder the message. This exploration is mostly done by Cailee Spaeny’s character, Jessie. She starts off wet-behind-the-ears, deeply shocked as she speaks to a gas station security guard with two dangling and badly abused prisoners (“This guy was in my high school class!” the militiaman chirps as the accused looter pleads for mercy). But under the guidance of her older colleagues, she becomes more and more willing to stomach witnessing and photographing violence, eventually becoming an extremely (and obnoxiously) reckless photography machine bent on getting as many black-and-white stills of combat and death as possible. It’s a weird, snapshot-by-snapshot voyeur’s view of warfare, and it does leave the question open about the role and purpose of journalists in conflicts, what they’re trying to show and why.
Of course, all the thematic depth of blurred lines, roving bands of killers, life disparities and desensitized war reporters was shot down by the unfortunate fact that this film is extremely sterilized in its politics. The Offerman president is hinted to have started a crisis with a third presidential term, dissolving the FBI and an “Antifa massacre” (make of that what you will). His intro speech is a clearly insincere attempt at shoring up morale for a dying cause, presidential but with a tinge of the grandiosity thrown in. The Texan-Californians storming to D.C. have nothing that describes anything about them, aside from the fact that they really want not-Ron Swanson dead. A senior reporter character speculates that they’ll turn on each other once they take over the capital, but again, speculation. We don’t even know their leader. There’s too much wasted potential in this film and it’s honestly a shame. Garland’s 2024 film could have left something profound, buoyed and strengthened by its sub-themes, but the decision to leave the film meandering in vague apoliticism was a bad choice. It makes “Civil War” less of a possibly deep film about what America could come to and more of what the marketing depicted it as — a dumb action movie. Wait, but the action sucked too.