Unlike other war movies, Alex Garland’s Civil War is told from the point of view of those behind the cameras. War photographers in search of the elusive moneyshot, Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and Jessie Cullen (Cailee Spaeny), along with journalist Joel (Wagner Moura) take their quest all the way to the top. The film follows them from New York City to Washington DC–from war-torn city streets, through the free-for-all frontier law of rural areas, through the military frontline, all the way to the White House. As Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) reminds them on the way, “It’s not a story if it never gets filed.”
The scariest part of the film isn’t the gunfire, explosions, death, or destruction. By far the film’s scariest feature is its ontological instability, the watching of one’s world crumbling with nothing in the way of recourse. The lack of cues from limited access to media heightens the sense of helplessness. The lack of partisan politics is part of the film’s power. There is precious little information about what will come next, which adds to the fear and anxiety of the journalists trying to capture the collapse.
There is a paradox here, a struggle between exposure and isolation: exposure to danger and isolation from information.
The camera work of the better found-footage films, like The Blair Witch Project (1999), Chronicle (2012), and Cloverfield (2008), which the latter’s director Matt Reeves likened to “looking through a soda straw,” is eerie and effective in a similar fashion. There’s such a sense of exposure. The first-person point of view makes the viewer feel “in” the movie, as opposed to passively watching it. The scariest moment of M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs (2002) was when the television stopped working. The sense of isolation inherent in that moment is terrifying, isolation from safety and exposure to hostility. Much like the security camera footage of the Columbine shootings, and the camera-as-character of Cloverfield, Garland gives us a crippled information flow (i.e., looking through view-finders, no media coverage) while subjecting us to total exposure (i.e., driving through a country in the throes of war).
Filmmakers are typically trying to get movie cameras “out of the way” of the movie. Filmmakers typically aim for the camera to be transparent, much as transparency has been advocated in computer interface design. Authors Jay Bolter and Diane Gromala have argued that the interface needs to be reflective as well as transparent, as in windows and mirrors and their book of the same name. The interface needs to get out of the way sometimes (transparency) and provide cues for interaction at other times (reflection). Moving images have similar needs to fulfill.
In Civil War, the cameras are so decidedly in the way as to become focal points. Snapshots pause on the screen as they are taken. Their wobbles, glitches, blurs, and unrelenting singularity of viewpoint define and redefine our experience in the film’s undulating chaos. In this way, Garland deftly mixes form and content, mention and use. The photographic process is integral to the picture.
Even if it’s far from grainy security camera footage, the camera’s limits are what define this viewing experience. Even in defying our expectations, it is a surprisingly effective film. Even with its focus on photography, in Civil War the best shot is all Garland’s.
A version of this review originally appeared on bOING-bOING. I expanded it here after seeing the movie a few more times. My favorite scene, which I didn’t get to talk about above, is just after the midpoint when, having just escaped a certain death (featuring the momentary but meme-worthy appearance of Jesse Plemons), the main characters are driving through a forest on fire. Burning embers float in the air around their truck as Sturgill Simpson’s “Breakers Roar” is playing. It’s such a beautifully brief respite from the chaos.
Also, Sturgill Simpson is only one of the many great artists on the soundtrack. Civil War also features songs by Can, Suicide, Silver Apples, and De La Soul, as well as the score by Garland’s regular collaborators, Geoff Barrow and Ben Salisbury.
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-royc.
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