MOVIE REVIEW! - 'Civil War'

'Civil War' (2024)

FIND THE FULL REVIEW UNDER THE RATING!

I don’t know. Maybe a few too many zombie films from the 2000s and several seasons of “The Walking Dead” have turned me against dystopian films in general. Because that is essentially what “Civil War” is. It’s a zombie movie without the zombies and at the end of the day, I wasn’t won over by it despite some great direction, good performances, and pretty zany third act.

In the movie, we are already in a second Civil War. There is no context as to why we’re in a new civil war or how long it’s been going on. Well, I'll take that back. There are hints that by this point, a third term president has become tyrannical and has sealed off Washington D.C. while the Western Forces of California and Texas are closing in.

But that’s about it and you’re not really sure who you’re supposed to be supporting throughout the movie. Perhaps that’s the point, but I really couldn’t buy into this particular dystopian world that writer and director Alex Garland built to play around in.

Kirsten Dunst plays a weary photojournalist in 'Civil War'.

The president has also driven away the press entirely over the past 14 months. That’s why Joel (Wagner Moura) wants to go to D.C. from New York. He wants to be the first to get the story and he’s accompanied by Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), a photographer who is starting to break from all the things that she’s seen throughout the war.

They are also joined by Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a young photographer that looks up to Lee and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a veteran journalist who also wants in on the story. They soon begin a road trip across a war-torn America and encounter various soldiers and battles along the way. The question now is whether or not they’ll make it to their final destination.

I should state that I do get that the movie essentially wants me to follow this team of journalists and experience their story. While I liked the characters, I didn’t really care for what I thought was a rather generic “been there, done that” dystopian.

Cars piled up and rusted along the major roads? Check. Burned out towns? Check. Soldiers doing shitty things just cause? Check. A government on the brink of or going through a major collapse? Check. Seriously, the only thing missing were the zombies, replaced here with bad people doing bad things.

Garland wanted to create a bleak and unforgiving world. He maybe even wanted to comment on the current state of our divided political society. Hell, maybe he didn’t want to say anything at all. Instead, he created a generic dystopian film that doesn’t really add anything else to the formula. 

It’s a movie that had a lot of promise but ultimately just doesn’t work.