SCREEN SHOT - Civil War (2024)

 

Civil War has broken out in the US. States wanting to leave the union have formed their own army known as The Western Forces, and all the indications are that they are on a final winning frontier. But the President is holed up in the White House, making encouraging announcements to camera that his forces are effectively pushing the rebels back. A small group of a photographer Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and a couple of journalists Joel (Wagner Moura) and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), are travelling across dangerous and still contested terrain, trying to get to Washington to photograph and interview the President. Along the way they pick up a young adult photographer Jessie ( Caliee Spaeny) a bit naive and green, but who idolises Lee's work and wants to be like her. Lee, much to her frustration, is forced to take her on and teach her how to operate and stay safe as a photographer, when combat and fatalities are going on all around you. The personal civil war here is to stay alive and still sane.

I've seen Civil War twice now, and each time I am struck by how this film does not pull any punches in showing you the horrors of war. The political set up is believable, particularly with the current US political regimes behaviour. But the film, however, is not really about why the civil war is happening, or the rights and wrongs of it. Its really concerned with what documenting it does to your mental state. Primarily its what this has done to the photographer Lee. Whose character traits bares strong echoes of what happened to Lee Miller. She is as hard as nails, battle hardened. Very effective as a photographer in difficult situations. She sees something of herself in Jessie, but steadfastly resists romanticising what war photography requires of you. You can see that some part of her is emotionally inactive, deadened almost. You are given a palpable sense for how oddly inhumane the war photographers task is. People are suffering and dying right in front of you, and rather than help or console them, they are taking a photograph of them in the process of dying. Its uncomfortable to watch, because it shows you just how weird that is. A tragedy happens later in the story, and only then does Lee completely lose her stern composure and mentally falls apart.

Alex Garland wrote and directed Civil War, and it has all the feeling for prescience and character led drama one expects of his movies. A pivotal scene, is a master class in show not tell, where the group encounter a White Supremacist (Jesse Plemons) in the midst of committing an unspeakable atrocity, and this is the most nerve wracking unsettling scene in the entire film. Very few words spoken, but the tension is absolutely unbearable. The films scenario is extraordinarily believable. Civil War echoes contemporary issues and dilemmas without turning its entire narrative purpose into a political piece of propaganda or moral tub thumping.  Kirsten Dunst's performance is the real cold hearted, yet mesmerising, hub of this entire movie.

CARROT REVIEW - 6/8