‘Civil War’ is terrifying not for what it says about America, but about journalism

Around 2 p.m. on Friday, I opened my laptop and bought a ticket on Fandango for that night’s showing of Civil War, the No. 1 movie in America that depicts a not-too-distant U.S. future of killing fields, refugee camps, and bombed-out shopping malls. At almost the second I was hitting the “confirm” button, the internet started lighting up with a shocking headline from New York City: A man had lit himself on fire, right outside the courtroom where ex-President Donald Trump is standing trial.

“We have a man, he has set fire to himself, a man has emblazoned himself outside of the courthouse just now ...,” a shocked and understandably rattled Laura Coates, the CNN legal analyst who’d been conducting a live interview less than a stone’s throw away, reported as the flames climbed high into a Lower Manhattan afternoon. “We can smell the air, I can smell the burning of some sort of flesh, I can smell the burning of some sort of agent being used.”

The violent death on live national TV of a man said to be an unhinged conspiracy theorist suggests the challenge that Civil War’s writer and director, the Englishman Alex Garland, faced in trying to render a near-future American apocalypse that would shock moviegoers at a moment when political violence in this country is already at levels not seen since the 1960s, or maybe the 1860s. In this time when the office of a leading U.S. senator and former presidential candidate is the scene of an arson and it barely makes the news, and when a Republican seeking her own Senate seat tells voters to “maybe strap on a Glock” to prepare for the 2024 election, how could Garland create a fictional dystopia worse than reality?

To pull this off, Garland’s one-hour-and-49-minute film is a nonstop montage of “it can happen here” shock and awe, with black smoke or orange flames shooting from a strip mall, high-rise office, or suburban McMansion in almost every shot, and more dead people than you’d see in a typical zombie movie, which is what Civil War feels like at times. These are the times when Garland’s work feels less like a motion picture and more like a music video for Talking Heads’ end-of-America 1980s masterpieces “Life During Wartime” or “(Nothing But) Flowers.” This was a shopping mall, now it’s all covered in flowers.

You may ask yourself: Well, how did we get here? Well, there’s virtually no political belief either in the script or the deeper zeitgeist of Civil War. Garland shuns the classic Planet of the Apes-style montage of how things fell apart for a thin chain of hints about a third-term fascist president (played, briefly, by Nick Offerman, with a penchant for over-the-top lies that may remind you of someone) who abolished the FBI. The movie replaces ideology with geography, depicting a Western Alliance of California and Texas (excuse me?), with other rebels en route from Florida. The war’s current front line is in Charlottesville, Va., but no one is carrying tiki torches or chanting “Jews will not replace us.”

The movie’s success stems not just from its sensational premise, but from Garland’s unquestionable skill in the art of moviemaking, which peaks in an incredibly tense showdown at a mass grave that’s clearly inspired by the legendary Russian roulette sequence in The Deer Hunter (the scene even includes two Asian characters to ensure you make the connection). Such moments and the nonstop violence porn of exploding strip malls succeed in masking the utter lack of elements that create a great movie, such as compelling dialogue or character development.

Or a point.

What drives Civil War around the various bomb blasts is a standard B-movie road-trip narrative, with star Kirsten Dunst as the beyond-jaded, acclaimed war photographer who’s taken on a 23-year-old protégée under duress, and travels with a single-minded Reuters reporter (who never files a story or even posts on X) and an older journalist from “what’s left of the New York Times” (a view many of us hold in the nonfictional present, but I digress ...).

Garland’s narrative has led many critics to conclude — correctly, in my opinion — that Civil War is not a film about politics, but about journalism. The best interpretation is that the determination of the foursome to take extreme risks in driving through a wartime hellscape to get the story is a homage to the bravery of many real-world journalists — such as at least 97 reporters and photojournalists killed in the Middle East, mainly Gaza, since Oct. 7. Those heroes have made the ultimate sacrifice for pictures or eyewitness accounts that are a last island of truth in a world drowning in lies.

And yet, Garland’s decisions as auteur to completely neuter the politics of his movie and elevate a certain kind of journalism are actually the thing that terrified me about Civil War, much more than the chilling images of mass graves or battlefield executions. Joel, the Reuters newsman, is risking his life on the road to Washington because, with the U.S. government clearly on the brink of collapse, he is determined to get a quote from the doomed president. Why one quote would matter — or who will read it — with U.S. society on the brink of the Stone Ages is not clear. Nor is it well explained why Dunst’s character soldiers on, despite her obvious disgust that the moments of senseless violence she photographed in the Middle East and Haiti have come to America.

The journalists’ SUV patter celebrates their single-minded and perhaps fatal devotion to an almost Dragnet-inspired, just-the-facts-ma’am interpretation of their craft, the thin moral reed to which Civil War clings. In the key moment, Dunst’s Lee Smith explains her journalism philosophy to her young accomplice: “We record so other people ask.”

And yet, it’s clear from the strung-up dead bodies and the rebel forces staging urban warfare on Pennsylvania Avenue that nobody ever asked the questions their pictures or presidential quotes were supposed to inspire. Civil War never even suggests who was supposed to be asking these questions — maybe because Garland is so fearful of asking them himself.

Civil War’s revelatory moment is what should really scare the living bejeezus out of the little people in the dark at America’s multiplexes. That’s because in the real 2024 United States of flaming protesters and Glocked-up voters, with a wannabe dictator running to be a 47th president who would make the buffoonish Offerman character look like Abraham Lincoln, too many of our leading newsrooms are recording quotes and not asking questions about the actual collapse of democracy.

The zeitgeist underlying Civil War reminded me of how the five leading TV news networks recently put aside their competitive rivalries to write a rare open letter that revealed the one thing newsroom leaders care passionately about: begging Trump and President Joe Biden to stage televised debates in the fall. That’s because even with Garland’s vision of dystopia too close for comfort, TV bosses still only care about ratings and a showcase for “both sides,” even when one side is a lying, three-term-president-in-waiting. Like Civil War’s Joel, they just want to get that quote, nothing more.

While the major news outlets continue to obsess on “both-sidesing” a five-alarm fire for the American Experiment, aided by reporters seeking to find “the fun” in politics even when our politics feel like 1861, there are some folks who do get it. One of them is Chris Quinn, the editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, who from his Ohio perch is able to see the emperor’s new clothes of the nakedly clueless journalism emanating from D.C. and New York.

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Quinn wrote in his weekly letter to readers promising no false equivalency between Trump’s fundamental dishonesty and Biden’s decent, if flawed, presidency. In a subsequent interview with my friend Dan Froomkin, Quinn said he and his newsroom won’t remain silent while Trump treats immigrants “like they’re nonhuman. We’re following the exact path [as Nazi Germany]. And I think a lot of people see that but they’re afraid to say it because they don’t want to be vilified for using the suffering of millions of people to push a cause.”

That is what real courage looks like. It’s not the same bravery as dodging sniper fire or suicide bombers, but it’s the fearless journalism we need right now to prevent an actual civil war. Recording nonstop bloodshed makes for a better movie, but asking the right questions before the shooting starts would be a lot better for America.

Some critics have praised Garland for updating a classic genre of war correspondent movies that lit up the screen in the post-Vietnam haze of the 1980s, such as The Year of Living Dangerously, Under Fire, and The Killing Fields. Yet, in each of those classic films, the journalists who witness unspeakable violence and political repression from Central America to Indonesia ultimately confront the moral dilemmas of the horrors they’ve witnessed.

But Civil War’s road-trippers remain zombies in search of their money shot right until the bitter (and predictable) end. When gunshots are echoing outside the White House, it’s pretty obvious that the moment for real truth-telling had been missed a long time ago.

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