Civil War
Year: 2024
Rating: R
Length: 109 minutes / 1.82 hours
With Alex Garland’s latest film, Civil War (2024), I still maintain my belief that his films use the medium of movies to ask, “What makes us human?” In his previous sci-fi works like Ex Machina (2014) and Annihilation (2018), the genre did most of the heavy lifting with that question. For Civil War, the current heated political climate is the backdrop that shines a harsh mirror on humanity during armed conflict. The framing, however, is truly what makes this film stand out—and it’s not about politics at all.
As a photographer, I understand what it takes to capture a moment without being part of the moment. You need to be present, but neutral. Civil War pushes this concept to its limits within the context of war photography. How does the press capture these atrocious moments while standing by to let them happen? Is documenting the war more important than stopping it? On top of everything, a war photographer must be numb to the things they see through the lens, as these memories surely haunt these photographers until the day they die.
Garland’s stroke of brilliance in Civil War was to make the setting much more jarring than some banana republic or oil-drenched Middle Eastern coup. Thanks to the 24-hour news cycle, Americans are given all the outputs of foreign war photographers. However, we lack the context of the horrors because they don’t take place in a place familiar to us. The sides of the conflict in this version of a Civil War don’t matter—what matters is how easily the safe and stable country we are used to devolves into factions and immediate violence. By bringing the war to our country, the impact of a war photographer’s job becomes all too personal.
An eerie commentary on the neutrality of war photography, I give Civil War 5.0 stars out of 5.
