In March 1993, South African photojournalist Kevin Carter captured the chilling image of a young Sudanese boy (misidentified as a girl at the time) collapsed in hunger as a hooded vulture watched patiently. A few days later, it was sold to and published in The New York Times and became something of a sensation, prompting readers to call the newspaper and ask about the child’s fate (according to his family the boy, later identified as Kong Nyong, eventually reached a UN food aid station). A year after the photo was published, Carter won the Pulitzer Prize for feature photography. Four months after achieving the highest honor in his field, he committed suicide, haunted by his personal problems and, according to the note he left, “the vivid memories of killings & corpses & anger & pain … of starving or wounded children, of trigger-happy madmen, often police, of killer executioners.”

When Carter’s photograph of the starving boy and the vulture are discussed today, it’s often in relation to the ethical quandaries journalists of all mediums must navigate as they document life and death situations. According to his colleague João Silva, Carter chased the vulture away. However, other subjects of Carter’s photographs, such as the neo-Nazis shot by South African police during the Bophuthatswana crisis, or alleged Black police informants executed via “necklacing” by resistance groups, would not be as lucky, and Carter and his colleagues documented their deaths without preventing them.  

That image of “necklacing” – in which a gasoline-soaked tire is forced over a victim and set aflame – crops up early on in Civil War, the splashily-marketed new film from British novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-director Alex Garland, in a flashback experienced by veteran photographer Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst). Beyond its commentary on the nature of journalistic neutrality, indifference, and culpability, Garland’s decision to invoke Carter’s work makes one thing very clear – if you’re here for a story about how Garland thinks America will fall apart, you will be disappointed. You will not find out how or why Texas and California teamed up to create the “Western Forces,” what the “Florida Alliance” is, or what Nick Offerman’s unnamed president did to make everyone so mad at him. Instead, you’ll get an exploration of the psychology of people who choose to document warzones for a living, what it does to their souls, and what it says about the people who consume these images. That much, like the images captured by the war photographers in the film, is clear. Whether or not Garland can turn his attempts to wrangle with these issues into a good movie is another question entirely. 

Unlike the film’s undescribed political situation, the plot of Civil War is relatively simple. Despite the president’s self-aggrandizing (hmm) speeches hailing “the greatest victory in the history of military campaigns,” the official government of the United States is on the brink of collapse, with the armies of the Western Forces camped out in Charlottesville, Virginia (HMM), intent on invading Washington, DC. Lee and her writer partner Joel (Wagner Moura) want to get there before the secessionist army so that they can conduct an interview with the president, no small task considering that his administration apparently regards the press as enemies as well (HMMMM). Joining them for their circuitous route from New York to DC through Pennsylvania and West Virginia are Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), an old war correspondent who just wants to get to the frontlines and thinks they’re on a suicide mission, and Jessie Cullen (Cailee Spaeny), an admirer of Lee and aspiring photographer herself that she’s reluctantly taken under her wing after they meet at the site of a suicide bombing.

Haggard and emotionally hollow, Dunst’s Lee is perhaps the most de-glammed role she’s ever taken on, an empty husk of a human documenting unspeakable cruelty because it’s the only thing she knows how to do (we’re told she rose to fame after shooting the “antifa massacre,” but  whether it was antifa who was massacred or did the massacring is never addressed). She can’t even get the sick adrenaline high that Joel and the other journalists around them get from covering the conflict, and unlike Sammy, she’s disinterested in finding any meaning in her own drive to document the world around her. The only thing that seems to motivate her is making sure that Jessie doesn’t get herself killed, but even this has its limits; after the photographers witness a militia member execute two captured looters, a shaken Jessie asks Lee if she still would’ve taken a photograph of the killings if she were the one who was shot. “What do you think?,” Lee snaps back, barely trying to provide Jessie with any sense of comfort at all. 

There are two layers to Lee’s jadedness. The first is the emotional toll that her work takes on her, which is obvious from her evident inability to enjoy a single moment in her life. The second, and the one that I think Garland is more interested in, is that Lee’s very profession plays a role in dehumanizing the people in her photographs. When we, the real life denizens of the relatively peaceful Western world, see pictures of dead people in Ukraine or Gaza or Sudan or Haiti, we’re able to mentally compartmentalize the tragedy because, regardless of their race or ethnicity, they don’t look like us. Their clothes, buildings, natural environments, and even weapons provide them with at least the slightest sense of the alien, and these small differences allow us to abstract their suffering into something happening “over there.” By showing people who look like average Americans committing war crimes against each other, Garland tries to disrupt that process of abstraction, even if he’s doing it through a work of fiction. 

There are dozens of harrowing sequences in Civil War, but perhaps the one that will stick with me most is that of a doughy forty-something militia member in a Hawaiian shirt pinned down by gunfire from a uniformed soldier in an abandoned office park (the get up of this unnamed character and his comrades resembles that of the far-right “boogaloo boys”, but we never find out who or what they’re fighting for). It’s almost embarrassing to admit, but seeing someone who looked like one of the neighborhood dads I passed by while walking my dogs Saturday, someone who looked so familiar and dare I say harmless, in such a kill-or-be-killed situation shook me to my core. Equally as disturbing is the way that Jessie’s ensuing photographs both dramatize and flatten the fighter’s eventual death. The images Jessie takes are filled with drama and danger, but they fall to convey the militia member’s stuttering attempts to run for cover, his allies’ pleas for him to move, the deafening blasts of gunfire. They make what happened look natural and dynamic, even if viewing it in real time saps the moment of its glory and reveals someone who might be considered a martyr as a fool who never had a chance. 

Garland’s prior three films – Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Men – dealt with similarly weighty themes like, artificial intelligence, environmental catastrophe, and misogyny to varying degrees of success, but Civil War feels like his most narrowly focused film, honing in on the ethics of war photography and journalism to the exclusion of most other ideas that might crop up when one sits down to write a story about a second American civil war. Garland’s unwillingness to give a casus belli for the conflict outside of the president’s apparent attempts to consolidate power (he’s currently serving a third term and has disbanded the FBI) is a rhetorical device that not only emphasizes the senseless of war (“‘Nobody’s giving us orders, man,’” a sniper tells Joel. “Someone’s trying to kill us. And we are trying to kill them.”) but, by denying us a side to “root” for, forces the viewer to focus on the actions of Lee and her fellow journalists. In principle, I don’t have an issue with that decision, but in practice, it forces the film to exhaust most of its ideas early on and makes most of the ensuing carnage feel like empty spectacle. 

“Journalists are vultures” is practically a genre unto itself, and while Garland has found a novel bait-and-switch tactic through which to lure people into the theater to hear his treatise on media ethics, it doesn’t seem like he actually has a whole lot to say about the subject (Garland has actually described Civil War as a “mainly a love letter to journalists,” but I’d argue he portrays them as either cold-blooded voyeurs or reckless thrill seekers). You start to understand his gripes around the third time you see Lee and Jessie detachedly snap pics of war torn suburbia, so by the time we reach the much memed but still heart-pounding Jesse Plemons standoff sequence or the technically impressive assault on Washington (both of these beats are advertised in the trailer, so I don’t consider them spoilers), you feel like he’s doing little more than throwing his paranoid, politically polarized audience a bone, rewarding them with the war movie they were promised because they sat through the journalism movie he wanted to make instead. The end result is a movie about exploitation becoming an exploitation movie, something to shock and titillate a nation in the midst of one of the most contentious electoral campaigns in American history, a cheap thrill attached to some deep ideas.

I can’t decide if this makes Civil War shallow or brilliant. On the one hand, it feels like Garland is creating the very thing he’s railing against. On the other hand, that may exactly be the point. Even though he wants Civil War to demonstrate the limits of war journalism, Garland might just recognize that his chosen medium is equally as limited, and that the most effective way to make his point is to entertain audiences with the kind of horrible events that we would absolutely not find entertaining in real life. By making us feel even a modicum of excitement during Civil War’s action sequences, Garland is demonstrating the limits of human empathy – we should be aghast at these images, but instead we gawk at them and their awesome power. Perhaps this is giving Garland too much credit – perhaps he actually is a man with one idea who knows what buttons to push to get people to see his movie – but I’ll at least entertain the notion that this meta-element of Civil War is intentional. It may not make it a great film, per se, but unlike the seemingly random conflict rendered on screen, it at least lends it some meaning beyond shooting for shooting’s sake.