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.
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)
