What he does Civil War to the spectators during the viewing in the theater it goes beyond the simple amazement that the fictitious dimension of any intelligent or biting film could inspire in other situations. The cinematic experience constructed by Alex Garland immediately strips itself of any spectacularization in this sense, and works closely with some specific details that they traumatize due to their proximity to the reality that we all know, with whom we interact every day, and which we read about in the newspapers. Everything flows, therefore, on the big screen, cloaking itself in an extremely familiar heaviness to the eye of those who are watching and to their own social, political and historical conscience and knowledge, finding direct evidence in the daily living, reading and above all finding out about people at the cinema. (for more details, check out our review of Civil War).
It’s exactly in this nature creative and disturbingly realistic that Civil War positions itself without moving an inch, playing with what we know and above all with what we have seen, in the representation of a dystopian and at the same time convincing situation. From all this, that pain, that inner torment that never really leaves you at peace from the beginning to the end of the story, and then clings to you even after you have left the cinema, digging deep into some question marks both inevitably suspended and anchored to a personal awareness found in some real news events. The mind goes back to the assault on Capitol Hill, but also to all the injustices and civil battles that the history of humanity has never hidden. In blood and “fratricide” here is the journalistic testimony becomes the only certainty and fundamental warning (if you are interested in films with a clearer historical and political imprint, we refer you to our review of Rustin).
A nightmare impossible to ignore
Why is Civil War so scary? Simple, because it tells of a future that doesn’t seem too far-fetched.
In the brutal violence of a civil war within America itself, symbolisms and moments emerge that leave their mark precisely in light of what has happened and is happening in the West, in the “world” closest to our lives, and in that set of cultural and historical echoes that we can never completely leave behind. In the journey that America itself has undertaken to establish itself as such, a series of internal inequalities that are difficult to ignore take shape, especially in a current situation in which everything seems to be constantly in the balance and hanging by an invisible, temporary and sharp thread. The real terror inherent in Civil War comes precisely from the plausibility of its narrative material, from that particular little voice that continues to torment you during and after watching at the cinema, fueling doubts and questions that seem to find confirmation in a present with a bitter and ambiguous taste in this sense. In the detached and bloody excesses of a despotic context and pure imagination, Alex Garland manages to break the certainties of his own spectators inspiring an anguished wait that grows, perhaps aiming to become an unconscious certainty.
Civil War is a real waking nightmare especially for us, for the spectators who are able to see in his narrative dynamics an underlying truthfulness that is heartbreaking and connects directly to the specific experiences of a world that perhaps, deep down, is not even too distant from what happens in the filmic fiction of Alex Garland.
Contrary to what one would expect, however, at least based on the reactions of specialized critics and the public to cinema, Civil War is not intended to be a satirical or specifically political film. It is precisely the very structure of the film, even in creative terms, that betrays a directorial vision that becomes direct testimony to a disruptive but always imaginary fictitiousness. In the construction of the unreal narrative, a handful of protagonists take over to enhance its essence, continuously alternating both a broad and personal approach to ongoing events, in an intimacy capable of becoming an objective transposition of what happens passing through the lens of journalism strong with a voice that goes beyond things.
What kind of American are you?
All the action at the heart of Civil Warnot surprisingly, is entrusted to a group of photojournalists with a single objective, that of bearing witness to the dynamics of a deep wound within a nation who has totally lost control of himself. In the simplicity of a gesture such as taking a photograph of a fleeting moment, lies one of the greatest reflections underlying the film, that of the importance of bearing witness to something, of imprinting an event forever, a cross-section of time and one’s own era so as not to forget its momentary cruelty and that brutality that scholastic history books tend to sweeten or muffle.
From the courage of a chronicle that stops at nothing, even throwing itself into the heart of a deadly conflict, the voice of a feature film develops that exploits the journey of its protagonists and the experiences they live directly, to transform momentary violence into historical testimonyplacing on the shoulders of these journalists the task of reporting something with which it is not easy to come into direct contact, even where one interfaces with elements that no longer have anything human, bathed in blood and an emotional detachment without justification, or also of limitless cruelty (indelible, in this sense, are the sequence set in a petrol station/car wash and that of the mass graves with Jesse Plemons).
The search for the truth at any cost is the main fuel of all of Civil War. Building itself around such a dynamic, Alex Garland’s film rediscovers and highlights all the importance of a journalism that has nothing to do with the current one, with that on the web made up of news reported by the second, and the most disparate gossip pronounced who knows where by who knows who, finding, in the intentions of its own protagonists and in their tenacity, the profound reasons for a profession that must broaden the gaze of its readers, placing itself as a messenger, even uncomfortable but still direct, of what is happening in the world. In such a reading, obviously, even the America of Civil War becomes a medium to convey a series of approaches and reasoning that can easily look elsewhere.
Passing through the camera lens, the expressive perspective of Civil War applies, on the fiction in progress, a filter that transforms the objective intentions of the protagonists, impressing its importance from beginning to end even outside the story in progress. Garland’s feature film, not surprisingly, interfaces with viewers through shots taken directly in the field, demonstrating the importance of the images themselves and the role of news in relation to human history and the events through which it developed and it is developing. It is good to remember, however, that Alex Garland’s direction itself never comes close to the feelings and sensations in progress, preferring to move away from what the characters feel, and therefore applying a further detached and above all very dry filter, capable of convincing without alienate.
The horror of a fictitious world in ruins, and the desire to witness its reasons and ongoing actions, therefore becomes something to reflect on directly inside and outside the cinema. Civil War it takes root in those doubts that Western civilization knows, or seems to know, very well even outside of America itself. This, represented as a land bloodied by hypocrisies, protests and the desperation of others, it immediately becomes a warning and a direct and no-frills transposition of the human ferocity of our time. We are all America’s Civil Waror we could be, and among the cruel and devastating folds of a civil conflict from which no one is ever spared, it is all too easy to see the same identical and brutal hypocrisies of our present.
Precisely for all these reasons comes the fear of what Civil War says and triggers. It is not just a question of “narrative modalities”, but above all of their relevance to a story, to a real nightmare within which it is practically impossible not to see some dynamics of our daily life. It comes from the weight of a no-frills narrative an essential feature film and practically impossible to ignoreimportant for what it says and suggests using the touch of a director who is not afraid of shaping a narrative material that is certainly controversial, debated and not easy to manage.
