It is with some sadness that I write this review. Alex Garland has a very good track record making movies and TV shows; I have liked virtually all of them that I have seen. And so I am more disappointed than I might otherwise be about this movie, which I watched mostly on the strength of his previous work. I know that a lot of people really like this movie, but it just does not work for me.
If I had to describe it in two words, those words would be "unpleasant" and "pointless." That it is relentlessly Unpleasant should not be up for debate; even the people who like the movie a lot would probably concede that, because it is a bunch of people going through a miserable time with basically no moments of joy at all. It is constantly punctuating any quiet moment with a jumpscare gunshot, having characters die in unpleasant ways, and reminding you that even in brief moments of respite everyone is still living under the Conditions of the Time, which are Very Bad. It's obviously okay for movies to be unpleasant; war is an unpleasant thing, and everyone knows this. Maybe in some distant age before modern media there were people who glorified war (other than pure propagandists), or maybe there weren't even then, but there certainly aren't now, and anyone who says otherwise is trying to sell you something, and that something is probably far away from their own home and life. If your movie has a purpose to its unpleasantness, by all means, go ahead! Most violent movies are unpleasant to a degree and I love tons of them.
But where we run into a problem is combining that with Pointless. Again, I do not need every movie to have a point - most do not - but most movies do not drape themselves in the wardrobe of Purpose. You cannot make a movie and call it Civil War and set it in present day or near future America without immediately presenting the aesthetics of have something to say, and so when you don't (and sorry Alex, but this movie definitely does not), it really feels bad. Maybe, if pressed, you could say that it is trying to say something about the existential act of simply existing in such a broken world (although it doesn't commit to this, and is willfully intentional about NOT investigating what those lives are like)), or about the sacrifices made by war journalists (much better served by a documentary, I suspect, rather than with some fictional characters in an implausible world), or about how civil war would be so bad that we should do anything to avoid it. But I can't really say I actually even see these messages in the film, I have to create them myself. Certainly, it offers absolutely zero insight about how one might prevent such a scenario, or what causes might lead to it, or really any sort of other moral position of any kind. It is actually remarkable how little it says, because I wouldn't have thought it could do it. Maybe I am just poisoned and desensitized by my own exposure to so much of this stuff in other media, but I do not think that is the problem here.
And if the movie says nothing, and is unpleasant, what does that leave you? You could maybe enjoy the narrative and the character arcs, I suppose, if that "story" even worked, which it doesn't particularly, because there is nothing really driving anyone's actions except that it's what they feel like doing, and they are on a self-assigned mission to do something no one asked them to do and which they have no real reason to do except a recurring message that they are chasing some kind of adrenaline high, which contradicts what very limited messaging the movie DOES have. It's very, very difficult to care what happens to anyone, or whether they reach their pointless goal; it is truly a mystery why one would make a movie about how important war journalists are and then set up the narrative to make nothing they say or do matter, with events flowing forward inexorably outside their control, in a way that would have been exactly the same with or without them. I guess it views war journalists as important only to inspire future war journalists, because we certainly don't see the results of their work anywhere else.
Score: 4/10
IMDb: Civil War
PS: For a good lesser-known Garland work, pick Devs instead. It's a good little near-future dystopia instead, with some actual interesting dilemmas. As an added bonus, you get nearly all the same actors, and my feelings about this film are not their fault.
PPS: It's not as important to why I don't like the movie, but I can't really get over how implausible it all feels. Simultaneously the stakes are so high and so low at almost all times; the world is operating in a dysfunctional war zone but people still have gas and power, there is no indication of any food shortages, and people just seem to be doing fine except on the front lines of the conflict. Just doesn't seem like that's how supply chains or anything else work to me. Really feels a lot more like a zombie movie that doesn't have zombies than anything else, and the Walking Dead already proved that idea sucks.
