Alex Garland’s previous film, Men (2022), was provocative, but it provoked one’s attention for the sake of a statement without much depth to it. Civil War, the filmmaker’s latest, is marketed and branded as a highly provocative sign-of-the-times political thriller. It wants on the one hand to be an eerie premonition of where the United States Democracy is heading as the country trudges through yet another contentious election year. But it is, in execution, far less provocative than it hopes to be, despite claiming to have a deeply resonant statement to make.

If Civil War is on the one hand an aspiring premonition, it is on the other a confounding sociopolitical mire whose vagaries are intended but also detrimentally distancing. This is to say, the fictional America of Garland’s civil war is not sure what exactly it is, and neither is Garland. At least, Garland does not present the audience with a coherent view of what America has become. The rebel factions of Texas and California have united forces in order to wage war on Washington D.C. and take out the President (Nick Offerman). Beyond this, the audience is given largely no insight into what the boundaries, motivations, intents, and history of this war are.

I must reiterate, this is by design. The audience is unmoored by this choice to obfuscate the nature of and reasoning behind this war, and, on occasion, this unmooring is weaponized by Garland to good effect. One early scene, in which the photojournalists we are following arrive at a gas station attended by three armed men with no one else in sight, is brimming with tension, exactly because the audience has no clear understanding of the stakes. These men could be anyone, they could have any allegiances or none at all, and this is what makes them threatening.

While this lack of exposition regarding the world we are dropped into heightens the stakes and the tension in specific instances, it also leaves the door closed for any meaningful political messaging beyond vague statements regarding the horrors of warfare and the callous abstraction facilitated by media representations of that warfare. This is not to say that Civil War requires Garland to take some sort of political stance regarding the real-world American democratic experiment. But the film presents itself to the audience with a gritty realism and a foreboding weight that suggests our own world may not be so many steps removed from the egregious, mindless bloodshed on display on-screen. It is difficult to take the mental leap required to bridge the fiction and the reality when no coherent political statement is being made. In the absence of political footing, we are left only with the horrors of war imagery that comprise the bulk of the film’s plot.

This imagery, unfortunately, is repetitive to a fault, such that by the time we reach the most gruesome and climactic moments in the film’s second half, the effect was lost on me. I did not find myself numbed to the atrocities as our protagonist, veteran journalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst), is. I was merely tired of the monotony of being hit over the head with hollow images of death.

Given that we see the war through the eyes of journalists – three grizzled professionals who’ve seen it all before (Dunst, Wagner Moura, and Stephen McKinley Henderson) and one tenacious photographer in training who is experiencing war for the first time (Cailee Spaeny) – the monotony becomes part of the aesthetic. Visually, this is not without its perks. As the group travels toward D.C. in a somewhat desperate attempt to interview the President, they witness episodes of violence, and they capture much of it with a glib remove. Hidden behind lenses, death is rendered still and mediated.

Garland uses the still photography here to good effect, but ultimately this is little more than a visual trick. The thematic weight of photography is too thin to be the narrative lynchpin to these characters the way that it is in the end. The climax sees two characters, with photography as the catalyst, swap bodies on an emotional level: one sees war with a newfound fear, and the other becomes excited by the ability to distance oneself from it. It is the only amount of character development afforded to these characters, and it comes too little and too late to have an impact.

Civil War looks good in a trailer. It looks politically potent on a poster, with that title plastered over a symbol of American liberty. Few of its picaresque scenes live up to this provocation in the context of the feature, though. The heavily marketed scene involving Jesse Plemons is the most accomplished aesthetically and largely carries through with the tension promised in the trailer. But most other set pieces are hampered by sameness, a lack of forward momentum, and a looseness in pace that is somehow both intriguing and off-putting. For what it’s worth, Cailee Spaeny is fantastic playing a character lacking in meaningful depth.

Civil War: C

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As always, thanks for reading!

—Alex Brannan (Letterboxd, Facebook)