By staying fiercely apolitical, what is Alex Garland's Civil War trying to say?

Alex Garland's new movie Civil War may be his most plausible piece of work to date.

Set in a near-future version of the United States, the film imagines what a second civil war in the country might look like. While Garland never reveals what triggered this war, there are some vague details, such as the disbandment of the FBI.

Stranger still, California and Texas form an unlikely alliance. 

Civil War shadows a group of photographers and journalists as they make their way through several war-torn states on their way to the White House. The main character — played by Kirsten Dunst — is on a mission to get the president to sign off on one last portrait and interview. 

Garland's attempt to stay as apolitical as possible has garnered praise from both sides of the political spectrum. But by doing this, what is he actually trying to say?

Writers Omar El Akkad and film critic Rad Simonpillai join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud on Commotion to unpack the message in Civil War and whether it portrays journalists in a realistic light.  

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast on your favourite podcast player.

LISTEN | Today's episode on YouTube:

Elamin: Rad, I'm going to start with the positives from you. What about this movie worked for you?    

Rad: I think there's actually quite a bit that worked for me because Alex Garland is a filmmaker who knows how to concoct some really stunning images and moments. I think he's a great collector of images and moments without necessarily building them into a satisfying whole. And I feel that way even about Ex Machina and Annihilation.  

So in this movie, I mean, you think of the image of when Kirsten Dunst's character is watching the news and you see a map of the United States reflected on her window, and there's an explosion that rocks the window, and that map shakes. That's a cool image. When they're driving through embers, it's a very Apocalypse Now image. When Jesse Plemons' face is an apocalyptic image. Like whether he's asking you about Frito Lay or what kind of American you are. My favourite scene in this movie and the scene that almost sold the movie for me is when they arrive at the small town and the people in this small town are like, "Oh, we just stay out of it."

Elamin: It's like the war never touched their town. 

Rad: The war never touched their town. And then the camera pans up and you see all these shooters on their rooftops protecting the town. And there's so much to pull out of that. The easy relevance of that scene is like America itself saying it's staying out of other people's conflicts, but then it's doing so at gunpoint. It's because it's armed to the teeth. But it's also I wonder if the generous reading of that is Alex Garland pointing out that this neutrality that he romanticises is all bull.

Elamin: Omar, when you first watched the trailer for this film, you thought it looked — in your words — "incredibly trite." And then you actually watched the movie. How did the movie turn out for you? 

Omar: I think it was an incredibly instructive movie, whether it wanted to be or not. The state of American political discourse as it exists right now. Where if you're living in the West in general, you are watching right wing political parties essentially obliterate the mechanics of democracy. You're watching a slaughter on the other side of the planet that's paid for with your tax dollars, are watching these incredibly violent things that are not just things in of themselves, but are projections of what's coming. 

But you also might have to go to dinner parties with people who support these things. And so one of the sort of central talking points and avenues of rhetorical safety that a lot of people have retreated into is this notion that there's bad things happening on all sides, and extremists on all sides are bad and bad things are bad, and so on and so forth. And I think this movie, whether it wants to or not, is such a fantastic distillation of that. 

But fundamentally, I think it's a political movie by virtue of its negative space, where you have this film that is desperately wanting for the moral righteousness of resistance, but also the comfort and stability of an empire. And those are two fundamentally opposing things. And what you end up with is a kind of mush. It's very loud, very provocative and not really seeming to say very much at all.

Elamin: Rad, do you think this movie actually commits to an apolitical frame, or do you see it as Omar says, which is to say, through avoiding answering these questions, that it's its own answer.

Rad: It's not to say that this movie is apolitical. I feel like we're using the wrong language when we're saying it's not a political movie, because of course, there's gestures towards everything you're talking about. Like Nick Offerman, there are shades of Trump in him. I get the feeling that people want this to be a movie that lambasts Trump because we're going into an election year and he's up for election. I don't need that from this movie in terms of complicating the politics so that we can't really suss out what this movie is trying to say. I do think that's a cop out. Because I do think what he's doing here is making a movie that is cosplaying as a serious and provocative film called Civil War that is coming out in the middle of an election year. And the most you can say is, "fascism is harmful. Nationalism is harmful."

Elamin: Certainly Omar, when you watch this movie, you're like, "I'm not really sure you're making a good case for the neutrality of journalism." I don't think you watch this movie and go, "this is the best model of journalism that will serve people for the journalists to completely disappear themselves and not at all appear anywhere on the camera." What do you make of the stuff that Alex Garland is just saying? 

Omar: So this notion that everybody hates journalists, that can't be entirely true. 

The leading Republican candidate for president has repeatedly called journalists enemies of the people. There's a lot of the centre right, including the Democratic Party in the United States who hate Palestinian journalists because they are presenting a version of events that directly makes a grotesquerie out of the image that these folks are trying to sell. 

Now, whether you agree or disagree with anything I've just said, at least I've said something. And this goes back to the way that journalism is presented in this movie. I don't think it's factually incorrect. I think there's parts that are hyperbolic for sure, but that's moviemaking. It goes back to this idea of the fundamental purpose of journalism, which is to name the thing and to say what happened. And you can try and lean on the supposed neutrality and objectivity of journalism, which has never been there from the beginning. You can't be a journalist and be completely objective and neutral. You have to want to make things better on some level. But also this is journalism within the context of a piece of art that you chose to make. So you could have gone and done journalism right. 

I'm sure he has the resources to go to any part of the world that desperately needs journalism right now to try and do it, but you chose to make a work of art and a work of overtly political art. You can't then selectively hide behind the supposed impartiality of journalism in the way that the movie quite literally does. When things get too intense, suddenly we get a bunch of still shots of that happening. You can't keep doing that and have your cake and eat it too. I don't think this was a bad movie, but I do think it's a movie that has a bunch of ejector seat buttons over it.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Jane van Koeverden