The timing and trailer for A24’s latest film certainly divided audiences before anyone even saw the film. That was intentional and provided a discourse to the film that will drum up an opening weekend surge. But what the film ultimately does is not exactly what the trailer alludes to, and in that respect, the film creates an even better discussion that is less derivative than other films of this genre.
Spoilers ahead.
In a dystopian future America, a team of military-embedded journalists races against time to reach Washington, D.C., before rebel factions descend upon the White House.
Review
Leave it to A24 to push the buttons that so many other studios are unwilling to push in an election year. The trailers for A24’s Civil War give you the impression that the film is going to be very much about political divides leading to a Civil War and the truth is that is not the focus of the story. This film instead drops us into the middle of the civil war without any context as to why it started, why the sides that were formed happened, and instead remains heavily character-driven as we follow a group of embedded journalists on a journey through a war-torn country heading to Washington, D.C.
As we follow a group of 4 journalists through this new reality, the parallels to what is going on right now in the world don’t escape the viewer or the writers. The fact that the civil war itself is secondary to the story doesn’t change the jarring and unnerving feeling you will have sitting and watching it all unfold as you start to compare facts with fiction. Many were shifting in their seats and leaning forward during specific scenes that were some of the most intense of the film. The film focuses on this idea of journalistic ethics set in the backdrop of a war-torn United States, instead of watching the press cover the fall of some far-off distant foreign country.
While all of this speaks highly of the film directing and acting chops of its cast, you leave the theater without it having provided a lesson-learned sort of takeaway from the film. What was the point? What is the film trying to tell us about politics, war, journalism, and human nature? This is left up to the viewer to draw their own conclusion on the politics, war, and human nature pieces. The film was careful to tip-toe around any direct parallels to modern and current political ideologies never mentioning them regarding any of the sides in this civil war. Instead, who is right and who is wrong is ambiguous. Where the film is very direct is how it’s trying to tell this story about the embedded journalists covering all the events at hand. Their ambition to get the ‘shot’ at any cost, to be the first with the story, watching and documenting as things happen around them without a care or concern for the why or the who.
