By Ben Wheeler
Buyer beware! This is not an addendum to the already bloated Marvel Cinematic Universe! I repeat: Not! A! Marvel!
Civil War is instead a shockingly violent and contemplative blend of road movie and war movie from A24, and their most expensive film to date; a cinematic experience that reminded me a lot of Sam Esmail’s incredible Leave the World Behind, a Netflix film that had no theatrical release, and yet was one of the most powerful movies of 2023.
What both films share is a glimpse into the fin de siècle days of the American Empire. Where they differ is in the focus. Leave the World Behind beautifully renders the confusion that people in the United States feel now, and also the disbelief that would be felt should their society suddenly implode in the way that happens in the story. It is this destabilisation of reality that allowed a billionaire reality television star to become president, and when he failed to secure a second term, had destroyed any remnants of consensus reality the 21st century might had still held on to, inciting a charge on Capitol Hill.
This is all right out of the dystopian cinema handbook, apart from the way people reacted once they got inside the Capitol buildings, which was… confused: taking photos and videos and feeding them back into the virtual reality that had urged them to go there in the first place. Ironically this gave authorities the evidence they needed to prosecute them in the days and weeks that followed.
In Civil War writer director Alex Garland (Men, Annihilation, Ex Machina) pushes the self-reflexivity into overdrive, making the focus of his film journalists, war correspondents in the mix of the violence and confusion. What we experience then, as the film spirals towards its conclusion, is not only a loss of meaning, but also the loss of the ability to represent and communicate that meaning.
We are bombarded with a bangarang of images and sounds – an audio-visual Molotov cocktail that leaves you bewildered as you attempt to process brutal assassinations juxtaposed with De La Soul’s Say No Go, and slow-motion images of a forest on fire to the sublime strains of Sturgill Simpson’s Breakers Roar.
“Everything is not what it seem/ This life is nothing but a dream,” Simpson laments in that lullaby, one of the most on-the-nose moments of symbolism in the film.
Garland’s choice to use “the media” as his entry point into the action also lends a meta-fictional air. It attempts to remove us from the action, with dispassionate old hands attempting to school a young photographer on the necessity for objectivity, while Garland is using everything in his increasingly impressive cache of cinematic skills to draw you in to a subjective and impressionistic experience of each moment.
The result is disorientating, albeit in a woozily pleasant way – in ways reminiscent of the dreamlike cinematography of such classics as Apocalypse Now! or Full Metal Jacket, and providing a true cinematic analogue for what it feels like to grapple with politics or culture or most anything anywhere in the world in 2024.
Strap in and enjoy the ride. Just don’t go in looking for internal logic or answers. And definitely don’t go in looking for Captain America.
Civil War is showing in cinemas this week.
