theatrical releases
Brutal and realistic: “Civil War” with Kirsten Dunst
Kirsten Dunst in a scene from the film “Civil War”. photo
© Murray Close/A24/DCM/dpa
A civil war is raging in the USA in the near future. Between road movie and action thriller, “Civil War” is a brutal fable of a divided nation.
Men with machine guns, tanks, scenes of burning forests and almost always with you: the camera. In a near future in the USA journalists want to document the civil war raging there – and are putting their own lives in danger in the process.
The action thriller “Civil War” by Alex Garland, starring Kirsten Dunst (“Spider Man”) as a war photographer, depicts a brutal and frighteningly realistic dystopia of a divided nation in the future – and is clearly designed as an anti-war film. It hits theaters on April 18th.
Alongside Dunst, who confidently plays the disillusioned and exhausted Lee, are also “Priscilla” actress Cailee Spaeny (Jessie) and “Narcos” actor Wagner Moura (Joel). They, too, are the chroniclers of the civil war, the cause of which – intentionally – never becomes completely clear.
Texas and California – which in the real world couldn’t be more different along political lines – are leading the so-called Western Forces to overthrow the dictatorial president in Washington DC. The group of journalists around Lee make their way to the government headquarters. There they want to closely follow the army units that are advancing to the president with their cameras.
Horrifying and almost surreal scenes
The action film by British director Garland (“Ex Machina”) largely appears to be a road movie. Again and again he creates horrifying and sometimes difficult to digest images – for example, of a mass grave with the corpses of all those who, from the perspective of a racist rebel, are not “typically American”. On the other hand, a scene in a (supposedly) peaceful US city that absurdly believes that it can stay out of the civil war seems almost surreal.
What’s particularly exciting is the development of Spaeny’s character Jessie, who starts out naive and ultimately becomes an unscrupulous journalist who is always looking for the best photo motif in the war. In places, “Civil War” can therefore also be understood as a criticism of sensationalism. When it comes to the question of who will get the best picture of the deposed president, a reporter warns a colleague not to steal the cover photo from him.
Dunst: “The film seems like a fable to me”
Despite the acts of cruelty, the film is not intended to be an aestheticization of war, as is often the case in Hollywood blockbusters. Rather, he wants to encourage people to reflect on reality. Kirsten Dunst sums it up in a press release: “This film seems to me like a fable – like a cautionary tale about what happens when people don’t communicate with each other.”
It’s a kind of fable whose moral becomes clear (“War is bad!”). But it doesn’t answer the most important question – namely, how it came about that these people fight each other so relentlessly. In the USA, the Civil War of the 1860s is anchored in the collective memory, when the South fought against the North over the issue of slavery. But “Civil War” is not a look back.
“This is not the danger that the world is facing. Rather, we are confronted with the danger of disintegration,” Garland said in a statement. Fake news, one-sidedness, absoluteness – these are acute and current dangers that are tearing people apart, not just in the USA. In short: “When we lose a common truth,” says Dunst. The scenes in which the White House is stormed are scary because they seem so realistic. Most people probably remember the real-life images of the storming of the Capitol in the USA three years ago.