The very idea that American society can be easily reduced to a simple culture war between competing progressive and conservative values is itself a symptom of a much deeper bankruptcy of political imagination. Such a view allows for seeing the world only through one’s preferred ideological “side,” rather than honestly admitting to the reality that most Americans (right, left, and center) are politically incoherent: living at cross-purposes with much of their stated political or social beliefs, careening wildly between desires for change and desires for stability and comfort, and often secretly enticed by the idea of violence or force as a substitute for the painstaking, deliberative process of collective governance.[…]
As a decidedly anti-war war movie, Civil War makes the case for the essential role that unsentimentality has to play in our present political landscape—a clear-eyed point of view willing to stand apart from popular opinion, ideological and party lines, and the self-satisfaction of political moralizing.
[…]
Garland does not want his audience to get lost in the characters’ psychology, the intricacies of plot, or the spectacle of special effects. Rather than an inflated emotional response to the film’s characters and events, he wants to elicit a critical evaluation of why and how the realities depicted on-screen have come to be. Thus, Civil War is not meant to provoke such banal queries as: Who is Lee Smith? Which side of the conflict is politically right or wrong? Or, Is this an accurate portrayal of photojournalism? But rather, unsentimentally: What is it about the American way of life that makes so many of its citizens easily seduced by the fantasy of living in a perpetual state of lawless violence?
[…]
The film forces audiences to get real about the vast difference between a hypothetical civil war that they might imagine ultimately solving the nation’s seemingly intractable “culture wars.” It shows how such an event would more likely make daily existence a living hell, precipitating the unraveling of the social fabric by obstructing people’s ability to meet their basic human needs and corroding the human dignity required to practice any form of meaningful citizenship. Second, the film is completely honest about the paradoxical nature of violence—that it is both psychologically unbearable and sadistically pleasing, physically sickening but also erotically charged, politically regressive yet coercively effective, literally deadening to some and affectively enlivening to others.
[…]
The entire crushing weight of the United States’ history of false democratic promises and shameless upward distribution of wealth and political power is damningly captured in Civil War, a movie that is ultimately about how the most affluent, comfortable, abundant country on earth could exercise the singular privilege of throwing it all away because of its psychic hatred of its own maldistributed notion of “the good life.”
— Ramzi Fawaz: Civil War’s Unsentimental Imagination (Film Quarterly)
It’s a movie marketed to indulge partisan fantasies of national divorce or collapse, but one that sits at enough of a remove from real politics that it’s avoided alienating potential audiences so far. There have been no serious attempts at a boycott since release. There have been no denunciations or cancellations of note. Red or blue, Americans like seeing America come to pieces on-screen. A conflict that would formally break the America we actually live in apart remains a remote possibility. But for reasons Civil War doesn’t speak to, more discord and violence are surely headed our way.
— Osita Nwanevu (The New Republic)
A piece of radical-centrist, middle brow bothsideism is not only sure to be the most successful film [Garland] has made, it is also by some margin the worst. But to my pleasant surprise, it's not a completely terrible and evil film. It is just a deeply mediocre one, one that on its surface is troubling and reactionary—and doesn't leave me hopeful for his future output--but which contains ambivalent and strange pleasures outside of the control of its own thudding allegory.[…]
[T]his is the ultimate politics of the film[:] Not even really right wing, it is liberal anti-politics, the cynical "both sides have their reasons, but ultimately it's just senseless cycles of violence", a perspective I've most often encountered in reflections from war photojournalists and conflict reporters. [T]his attitude of noble indifference to politics, believing only in some kind of "truth" captured in the camera, is deep boomer lore, but it also reflects the way US journalists cover the ideology of civil conflicts abroad, draining them of political meaning and turning them into unknowable and undecipherable images, "news" events too far from our experience to ever understand beyond their savagery and violence.
[…]
[The film's] combination of [subconscious imperialist] image processing and deep political disinterest is, I believe, why it is so popular and so successful at this moment. It is preparing the majority of Americans, or at least the bourgeois "everyday" middle class American to which culture addresses itself, to look at the rest of the country the way it looks at wars abroad. It is an ideological version of Foucault's boomerang, a kind of return of the colonial gaze, now turned inward on the American populace. It is preparing the audience, pleasurably, with horror, thrills and excitement, to see the collapse of the United States, but to see that collapse with the same depoliticized, removed and ultimately sneering gaze of the wise observer who refuses to get involved. It talks about the polarization of American society as equally arbitrary and ahistorical as it is elsewhere. The disorder and violence can only really be resolved by accessing the truth-seeking of the journalist, the magical objective viewpoint.
— Vicky Osterweil (All Cats Are Beautiful)
The event that first brings those people together is a suicide bombing in Brooklyn (Garland stops just short of showing avocado toast mashed into the rubble), which is such a pointed way of framing the movie’s political omnivorousness that I had to stifle a laugh.
— David Ehrlich (IndieWire)
If you’re tuned into world news at all, you aren’t necessarily as shocked by, as you say, a suicide bombing in Brooklyn as Garland’s camera seems to be, or that the film wants us to be. It is fascinating, though, how his camera treats the United States as other Western movies (and often ones that valorize Americans) regard the Middle East. […] A group of friends of mine in Los Angeles saw it opening night and all uniformly hated it because they felt like it had nothing to say. But maybe Civil War is maybe just not saying it (whatever it is) as loudly as we’re used to.
— Ryan Lattanzio (IndieWire)
In its vision of journalism as a form of amoral adventure-seeking, Civil War belongs to a long tradition of films about hardened war correspondents in far-flung places. [B]ut the fact that the carnage these reporters are documenting is homegrown shifts the inflection significantly. Suddenly it’s impossible to exoticize or otherwise alienate ourselves from the bloodshed onscreen, which makes us ask ourselves what we were doing exoticizing it in the first place. This effect of moral immediacy is Civil War’s greatest strength, and the reason it feels like an important movie of its moment even if it isn’t a wholly coherent or consistently insightful one.[…]
“What kind of American are you?” [T]hat may be the screenplay’s smartest single line, in that it dispenses with the metaphorical quality of Civil War’s imagined political dystopia and presents us with the real question many Americans are asking each other and themselves right now, sometimes in a self-reflective mode, sometimes in a contentious or overtly threatening one.
— Dana Stevens (Slate)
Watching the characters' fear in the heat of the moment brought out this visceral kind of fear in me that I have only ever felt covering combat situations. It's also a type of fear that I have trouble recollecting when I'm not there anymore. But it came out watching this movie.
— DonovanAl07 (Reddit)
Even if we were to imagine that civil conflict’s terror lies in the spectacle of explosions and leveled buildings — rather than the psychological abyss that faces ordinary citizens — the images in these thrillers don’t show audiences much that frivolous summer blockbusters haven’t done countless times before.
— Ismail Muhammad (New York Times)
At no point [do] we learn why anyone is fighting or what they’re fighting for. We are given absolutely no sense of who is good or who is bad; no sense of who we should be rooting for. Many have used this to criticise the film. They argue that it takes a dangerous both-sides-have-a-point approach that’s inappropriate in a post-Trump America. But I think that’s missing the point. The film is itself a critique of impartiality and both-sidesism, and in particular a critique of the kind of journalism that leans that way.
Synopsis: In the near future, a group of war journalists attempt to survive while reporting the truth as the United States stands on the brink of civil war.