“Civil War” is a good, intense movie with a near-fatal misstep

“Civil War” is a tightly-knit picture of a war-torn America filled with interesting technical choices that result in a shocking experience. However, the attempt to appear “apolitical” severely hinders the movie’s themes and is a big missed opportunity.

This movie accurately captures the personal effects of war on people, particularly a group of photojournalists. The film follows Kirsten Dunst (Lee), Wagner Moura (Joel), Cailee Spaeny (Jesse) and Stephen McKinley Henderson (Sammy) as they document the war-torn eastern U.S.

The dread of not knowing who you can trust and wondering what will happen next is palpable, and it hangs over the entire two hour watchtime.

On the surface, the movie is good.

But a complaint I had before seeing “Civil War” was that the director, Alex Garland, described it as “apolitical.” It was absurd to me to say that a war movie — let alone one that touts itself as being anti-war — is apolitical in any way; war movies are often the most political!

Since politics can’t be avoided, especially, again, for a war movie, the movie has half-baked ideas of what its politics are.

The president is described as a fascist by Garland in interviews, but the world that allowed this fascist presidency is left undescribed entirely. The movie makes note of the dangers of fascism, but nothing on the dangers of the rise of fascism, which is arguably more important.

The secessionist states, California and Texas, seemed to be picked only to fit the theme of the movie rather than by following some type of logic. It was a bit silly that these states, which are notably different in their views, would join forces to fight against a common enemy.

This creates many questions about this movie’s world. What made California and Texas secede? What is the rest of the world doing during this? Why is the entire eastern seaboard — which has a majority of the U.S.’s population — under fascist control? And how are they losing!?

These questions are left largely unanswered. Some understanding comes through dialogue, but the audience is never entirely in the know, which is not necessarily a bad thing for a movie. However, when the world is a big component for the story you’re telling, you can’t just ignore it.

There could have been so much more done with this story’s world if the writers and director had the tenacity to do it.

Think of all that’s happened in the last decade and imagine what this movie could have been: a brutal examination into the American character facilitated by the world we’ve lived through. This movie had so much to say, but it kept its mouth shut.

To release a movie about a second American civil war, at a time when the American public is intensely polarized, only to back away from the inherent tension that a topic like this has, is a glaring flaw for “Civil War.”

However, I am reluctantly able to put this flaw aside when it comes to discussing the real meat of this movie: a heavy focus on the people trapped in between the abstract push and pull of motivations and material conditions.

War kills equally, and destruction has no side. “Civil War” illustrates that well.

This movie is strongest in the scenes where normalcy is replaced with terror. Driving down a street with outlet malls, fast food restaurants and big ads for cheap attorneys creates a feeling of familiarity. Then, you see a burning car and people trembling past it with suitcases and soot-covered faces.

American war movies tend to glorify war, whether it’s their intention or not. One major problem is that they are set in foreign lands, and usually the Americans are the “good guys.”

This movie, thankfully, has neither of these problems.

American audiences are not able to disconnect from the location of the fighting. Bodies are being buried in a mass grave in the backyard of a bright red house out in the countryside. Anyone that has driven on backroads has seen this exact location before, and now it’s been blemished by war.

It’s hard for Americans to fully understand how war can rip apart all that seems normal and leave nothing but scraps to be picked up by the survivors. “Civil War” understands and portrays this extremely well. The characters can not exist in normalcy after what they’ve seen, which is largely true for survivors of any conflict.

This movie is also great at building and breaking tension.

Watching this movie is not an endless ride of constant terror. Like real conflict, it has its slow moments. These moments allow the audience some downtime, through which we see the characters slowly get more worn out. Things aren’t always bad, but they continue to get worse, and you can see it in the way they speak, move and relax.

This film also does an incredible job of portraying the role that journalists play in capturing history. It captures the feeling of being on the brink of the biggest story to be told, and what some will take to be the one that gets that big story out.

A lot of elements came together for this movie, and overall it is definitely something that should be seen. However, the glaring flaw still leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

The calls for civil war in America happened a few years ago, and since then, the tension over a real civil war has died down significantly.

Conflict may never reach our front door, but this movie shows what it looks like when it does. You get the feeling that your world is turned upside down, that all you knew has been erased and that making it out alive is all that matters. This is the reality for many in the world.

The biggest disservice this movie makes is not taking a stance. So many will leave thinking it was an awesome war movie about a possible civil war in America, and will thus miss out on its anti-war messages.

“Civil War” cannot be viewed as an accurate representation of what a Second American Civil War will look like. It should be seen as a warning to people who have never had their lives uprooted by tanks, bandits and bombs. It should scream, “This is war!” and hope that people will listen.

But this movie does not scream from the mountain tops. It merely whispers while it doles out common violence and destruction that can be seen in any R-rated war movie released in the last five decades.