Film review: 'Civil War' has no winners

Does director Alex Garland’s provocatively titled film “Civil War,” depicting exactly that in a near-future United States needlessly throw gasoline onto flames in a 2024 America that need no fanning?

A newsreel playing in the background mentions the president (Nick Offerman) is in his third term. The U.S. Constitution limits presidents to two terms. Something is wrong enough that the nation is at war with itself.

There is purposefully no background, no explanation. An improbable California-Texas secessionist alliance is battling the federal government. The audience will ride along as four journalists leave New York in an SUV to interview the president in Washington, D.C.

It is hard to imagine a road trip through a devastated land – the interstate littered with burnt out and abandoned vehicles, a downed military helicopter in a J.C. Penney parking lot – without tons of hand wringing, philosophizing or at least rehashing the conditions that brought the characters to this moment. But no. These three weary journalists don’t reflect, don’t compare notes, don’t discuss the reasons or causes that have torn the nation apart. There is no character development and little backstory. They never interview anyone and they never file a story.

Two photojournalists, the veteran Lee (Kirsten Dunst), battle-hardened and matter of fact, and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) raw and untrained, take lots of photos. Their close-up snapshots of soldiers in battle are shown, often in black and white.

The film excels at portraying battles and their aftermath. Cities are on fire, forests are on fire. There is smoke, explosions, noise, gun battles, soldiers, civilians and journalists getting shot and dying. There is blood on the street, on the floor and sponged and wrung out of the SUV where their colleague bled to death.

The soldiers on both sides are monotonously boring and brutish butchers, fighting for unknown reasons on each side, either to protect the president or to defeat the president and win each battle.

Early on, stopped at a countryside gas station, Jessie wanders out back to find two bloodied and blackened bodies, strung up, the men still moaning. A young local follows her, rifle in hand. He tells her he knew one; they were in high school together. Was is not hell for any of those fighting?

When the journalists get challenged by a soldier sprinkling lime on bodies he dumped into a mass grave, Joel (Wagner Moura) shows his press pass, saying “Press, I am with Reuters.”

The news service is a foreign name to the soldier. Joel replies, “We’re Americans.” The soldier asks, “What kind of Americans?” The women name their home states, Colorado and Missouri. Being from the heartland saves them.

Garland’s script beats a one-note drum: that war is hell, as Civil War Gen. William T. Sherman, supposedly said. In this “Civil War,” nothing has value and everything – from the Lincoln Memorial to the White House – is shot up and destroyed. If the film’s message is that war is senseless, dehumanizes everyone into killing machines, then the message is bluntly and bloodily delivered.

If the point is that civil war creates chaos, is a waste, to no purpose, makes everyone a barbarian and destroys life, liberty, property, the pursuit of happiness and people’s souls, then the film squarely hits its target.

“Civil War” played at the Lincoln Theatre last weekend.