A very violent road trip.

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This week I want to review Civil War, Alex Garland’s 2024 film which I only got around to watching a few weeks ago. I held off watching for a while, because I wasn’t expecting to like it. I had seen some part of a review which put me off (more on that below), but my hesitation was unfounded. This is a good film, and says a lot of relevant things about the military experience, which, of course, is always something I like to get into.

The spoilers will come thick and fast below, so take this as your fair warning. If you haven’t seen the film yet, you might want to check out my back catalogue and return here once you’ve seen it.

I’ll start off by talking about truth in war, and then look at some of the expected and perhaps unexpected aspects of civil wars. I’ll roughly follow the chronology of the movie to discuss the idea of blurred loyalties and then the review action which happens toward the end of the film, and which first piqued my interest a few weeks ago (recall the Javelin being fired at the Lincoln Memorial). I’ll round out the piece by talking about “moral injury”, which is a key theme of the story.

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Truth is the first casualty of war

This is a line that’s as old as civilization, or at least as old as the Ancient Greeks. Civil War brings us here right away: the opening scene features the president repeatedly practicing lines for the camera about how well the war is going. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say it most certainly is not going well for the government forces. Forget Aeschylus, Yes Minister summed it up quite well also:

There are lies within lies in this opening scene, and it’s easy to see parallels with present day political polarisation¹. It’s a great opening scene, simultaneously telling us about the military situation in an ironic way, while showing us that the President and his system are steeped in lies.

The next scene shows us the real-life effects of the war on ordinary people, while further putting the lie to the President’s reassurances. A mob waits for water rations in New York, while flak-jacket and helmet-wearing journalists mill around and take pictures. Kirsten Dunst plays the heroine, a war photojournalist, and her experience in combat zones around the world comes in handy as she recognises the tell-tale signs of a suicide bombing just before it happens:

The message is clear: we’re not in Kansas anymore. How does it rate as an explosion? Not too bad, I suppose. They do that film cliché where you hear the explosion three different times from three different angles, but otherwise it’s fairly on the nose in terms of blast and fragmentation effects.

One does not simply drive through a warzone

Dunst and her colleagues decide to drive to DC to get an interview with the President before the noose closes around him completely. Trouble is, there’s a war on, and it’s a several hundred mile² round trip via Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Virginia to get there.

If you’re thinking that this sounds like the setup to a road trip movie, you’re not a million miles off. This is one frame through which you can analyse Civil War, although I’m more interested today in talking about the themes. Worth bearing in mind, however, if you like a good road trip film to pass the time.

We see the effects the war’s having on the country. Our heroes must navigate checkpoints with trigger-happy troops and source supplies from suspicious partisans who have no qualms about shooting or stringing up people who displease them:

The freeways are clogged with abandoned cars, and whole parts of the country are no-go zones (hence the round trip):

Real life must go on

Despite the war, life goes on, in film as well as in real life. We see families eating together and kids playing in a converted stadium, as well as an entire town where the war seems eerily absent, save some sentries watching from the rooftops. I like this about Civil War, because it brings home a fundamental truth about war. For those of us fortunate to live in peaceful places, it’s all-too-easy to see war as an “other” state of existence which prevails in certain “other” countries. This mentality is a testament to our incredible capacity to forget very quickly, because there are very few places which haven’t been tainted by war once you go back a few generations.

Although it’s hard for us in peacetime to appreciate, surviving in the gaps between fighting is a common state of being for many in the world. Even in a full-scale conflict, the fighting doesn’t happen everywhere at the same time³. Pockets of violence move back and forth, and civilians hide when they must to emerge when they can and continue their lives. Civil War, since it focuses mainly on civilians, shows us plenty of this:

It’s a cliché that civilisation is only ever nine meals away from anarchy, but the corollary is that civilisation rarely⁴ reaches that nine-meal threshold, because civilisation rarely descends into anarchy.

What we really mean by this, in our comfortable armchairs, is that civilisation is only ever three meals away from a less comfortable version of civilization. Because missing nine meals is unthinkable for most of us, thankfully.

If civilisation can survive a bit of upheaval and keep going, as depicted in Civil War, then so can its ugly cousin, inequality. At the start of the movie, we see the reporters unwinding in a nice hotel, while only hours before, people were blown to pieces while queuing for water. This brings to mind many famous real-life “war hotels“, such as the Continental in Saigon, the Europa Hotel in Belfast, and the Holiday Inn in Sarajevo. New York is now just another “war” city, and the domestic and foreign journalists who cover the war need a place to unwind away from the front lines.

Most people in any way, even a civil war, are not belligerents, they are just trying to get by, to make it to the next day in harsh circumstances. This even applies to journalists and photographers, even though their job necessarily brings them closer to the action. But this “survival” mindset spills over into other characters in Civil War, sometimes in unexpected ways.

Wait, who do we hate again?

One thing which Alex Garland does well in Civil War is make it hard to distinguish between belligerents. The “rebel” forces have by far the most impressive military might, but even this we only see toward the end. Throughout the journey, the main characters come across militia groups and bands of armed men whose loyalties we—or they—can’t obviously tell⁵. This situation comes to a bizarre head during a tense scene when the heroes get pinned down by a sniper in a faraway building:

Funny things happen in a civil war. It brings to mind The Sniper, a short story by Liam O’Flaherty about the Irish Civil War. It’s an easy and quick read, you can get the full text on the link above, and it’s got a neat little tragic twist that fits right into what we’re talking about.

A later scene in the film is less bizarre and more disturbing, when the protagonists come across some soldiers burying bodies in a mass grave:

Here’s a pro tip that no-one should need: when you see soldiers putting bodies in a mass grave, go the other way, and quickly. Common sense aside, this scene further illustrates the alienation brought about by the civil war. The soldier in the red sunglasses doesn’t even know how to determine whether these people are friends or foes, instead settling for their “American”-ness as a proxy to whether they should live or die. This, mind you, in a civil war.

Eventually our road trip finds its way to DC and we join the Western Forces as they make their final assault on the capital.

Combat is nasty, brutish, and long

These final scenes of Civil War kick up the octane several notches, with main battle tanks, attack helicopters, mortars, and the aforementioned Javelin missile team. This scene is worth watching in full:

The rebel/Western Forces fight their way through to the White House and eventually go door to door, corridor to corridor. Cailee Spaeny’s young photographer character is in the thick of the action, following each stack of troops and stepping into the line of fire to take the best, but most dangerous, shots.

I thought these last scenes were quite good, and belatedly gave Civil War some of the action scenes which I had hoped for before watching it (yet more on this below). And as action scenes go, they hit the nail on the head. The gunfire was deafening, the troops were shouting all the time, and the pace seemed both relentless and slogging: just like real-life fire and manoeuvre or FIBUA⁶.

This scene also shows us the perils of getting too close to combat, as Spaeny’s character does: bullets are indiscriminate. She’s too far gone to care, though, snapping away as her colleague dies in front of her:

Conclusion: moral injuries may never heal

At the start of Civil War, we see the moral injury which Kirsten Dunst’s character has after decades covering wars around the world. She has seen death, grief, and atrocity, and has dispassionately photographed it all. But whether through the accumulated attrition of all the horrible things she’s seen, or because seeing this in her own home is the last straw, she can’t go on taking photos any longer.

This doesn’t happen to her colleagues: neither the young photographer (as we see above), nor Wagner Moura’s journalist character stop to grieve for Dunst after she is killed. There’s a president to catch, after all, and the scoop/photo of the century to get. Sure enough, Moura gets the quote, Spaeny gets the pic, and the president dies like a dog. We’re not supposed to feel sorry for him, of course, since this whole war was his fault. He started this, with the habitual lying we see at the outset. This is his moral injury, and it infects the nation, from the suicide bomber, to the militiamen torturing their prisoners, to the soldier who drives the truck full of bodies for the mass grave, to the other soldier who summarily executes the president, and the young photographer who doesn’t hesitate to get it all on camera.

The one criticism I had of Civil War as I watched it was that it didn’t go deep into the geopolitics of the conflict. Why did the president stay for a third term? Why were Texas and California the ones to rebel first, and how did the war spread throughout most of the country? What were the other factions in play, like Florida? I wanted to see the details of the conflict unfurl. I wanted something akin to Max Brooks’ World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War⁷. In writing this review, however, I’m withdrawing this one criticism. I still want to see that film, of course, but it’s not the story behind Civil War. The story behind Civil War is the story of distrust, of moral injury, and of civilization taking a few steps backward. And it’s also got some decent action in there at the end too: something for everyone, including the military nerd.

That’s all for this week, thanks for reading! Please let me know what you think of my review: if you’ve seen Civil War, do you agree? Please share this article to anyone who might be interested, and subscribe using the link below if you haven’t already.

Featured Image: Civil War (A24 / Entertainment Film Distributors, 2024).

1. Not just in the US, but especially there. ↩︎
2. Several hundred kilometres in commie units. ↩︎
3. Except for strategic bombing or nuclear attacks on cities. ↩︎
4. I’m not saying never: clearly it does happen in isolated places and times, and you only need to read the paper to see examples. ↩︎
5. I read a critical review of this film which says it depicts white, rural Pennsylvanians and West Virginians as the “baddies” loyal to the President. I don’t really buy this: I think it’s left deliberately ambiguous, as is the motivation of the suicide bomber at the beginning. ↩︎
6. Fighting in built-up areas. ↩︎
7. Which, if you haven’t read/listened to it, is absolutely amazing. The film is okay, but the oral history conceit of the book works exceptionally well, and simply must be read. ↩︎