Civil War Review: This Is How The World Sees America

What’s sure to be the most controversial aspect of «Civil War» is how it refuses to spell out all the details about how and why the war is happening. Some have pegged it as an «apolitical» movie because of this, but that’s not an accurate descriptor. There are more than enough context clues to figure out the «why» of the war, and while the «how» sometimes strains believability in the name of avoiding direct partisan parallels (the alliance between California and Texas somehow ends up easier to buy than some of its other big asks), the film’s not exactly taking a centrist stance about the political situation depicted either. What it is doing, however, is presenting this political situation from the perspective of journalists who are trying to stay objective for their job.

The main team of journalists we follow from New York to Washington, D.C. consists of two photographers, the veteran Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and newcomer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny of «Priscilla» fame), and two writers, Joel (Wagner Moura) and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson). These people will go through Hell to get the big scoop. Whether or not their reporting makes a difference is up for question, but they all feel someone has to do it — that the third-term President (Nick Offerman) is actively hostile to journalists makes our protagonists’ determination to report on the fighting in D.C. and the oncoming end of the war all the more significant.

Dunst and Spaeny are great not only as actors but as photographers themselves — according to a post-screening Q&A, they actually took all the still photos shown in the film! The mentor-student relationship between Lee and Jessie, and the way Jessie steadily must desensitize herself to the horrors surrounding her in order to do what her hero does, is the most compelling character arc in the film, though Joel also undergoes his own subtler reckoning with journalistic ethics as his attempt to score an interview with the President transforms into a different sort of assignment as the war takes its turns.