‘Civil War’ SXSW reviews: Alex Garland’s dystopian thriller is a ‘great movie’ that’s ‘bleak’ and ‘nauseatingly intense’

Liam Mathews
·4 min read
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Reviews are out for “Civil War,” the controversial thriller from Oscar-nominated writer-director Alex Garland. Critics who saw the film’s premiere at South by Southwest are mostly impressed by the politically charged A24 film. It has an 81% “Fresh” score on Rotten Tomatoes and a “generally favorable” score of 72 on Metacritic. While the trailer drew some derision for U.K. native Garland’s apparent misunderstanding of American politics for suggesting a separatist alliance between California and Texas, critics say that the film itself is much more “politically astute and plausible” than reactions for the trailer gave it credit for. And they emphasize that the film, which follows four journalists as they travel across America during a rapidly escalating civil war in the near future, is something very different than what it appears to be on the surface. (This is par for the course for Garland’s productions, especially the sci-fi mind-benders “Annihilation” and “Devs.”) 

In a rave review, Matt Zoller Seitz of RogerEbert.com calls “Civil War” “a great movie that has its own life force. It’s not like anything Garland has made. It’s not like anything anyone has made, even though it contains echoes of dozens of other films (and novels) that appear to have fed the filmmaker’s imagination.” Perhaps influenced by the trailer and the film’s provocative election year positioning, Zoller Seitz writes that he “went into “Civil War” with arms folded, expecting to hate it, because so many contemporary films about US politics by foreign filmmakers seem to have cribbed their worldview from New York Times editorials and bad Tweets. It upended all of my preconceived notions.” He describes the film as, first and foremost,  “a portrait of the mentality of pure reporters, the types of people who are less interested in explaining what things ‘mean’ (in the manner of an editorial writer or ‘pundit’) than in getting the scoop before the competition, by any means necessary.”

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Robert Daniels of Screen Daily describes the film as “a sobering view of the psychological toll wrecked on journalists covering war-torn landscapes,” with a “transcendent performance from Kirsten Dunst” as a hardened photojournalist named Lee. “‘Civil War’ features jaw-dropping battles that rattle and hum, foregrounded by a bleak, devil-may-care desire to consume, report, forget, and remember — captured through a jarring poeticism that would be wholly admirable if it weren’t so hard to take in,” Daniels writes. “‘Civil War’ is a tough watch whose precision and crafts elevate it to the heights of ‘Come And See’ and ‘Black Hawk Down.’” 

Katie Rife of IndieWire describes “Civil War” as a sort of inverse of Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning Holocaust film “The Zone of Interest.” “Both films deal with dehumanization and desensitization to the suffering of others, but where Jonathan Glazer’s film does this with absence and restraint, Garland’s assaults the viewer with nauseating intensity,” Rife writes. The film’s contemporary relevance is deeply disturbing: “In real life, America is growing crueler and more divided by the day, and the social fabric of the country is disintegrating along with its infrastructure,” Rife writes. “But ‘Civil War’ isn’t a plea for empathy, or even civility. It simply follows this trend to its logical end point, which is a country where militiamen with automatic weapons shoot strangers on sight and torture their old high school classmates in the burned-out shells of abandoned car washes.” 

In a negative review, Valerie Complex of Deadline found the film’s ideas to be underdeveloped. “The script’s utilization of characters of color as conduits for brutality needed to be explored further,” Complex writes. “By not adequately justifying this narrative choice, the film leaves interpretations open when explanations are warranted.” And, on a technical level, Complex finds that the volume of the gunfire and explosions overwhelms important dialogue and undermines the storytelling. “Ultimately, Civil War feels like a missed opportunity,” Complex writes. “The director’s vision of a fractured America, embroiled in conflict, holds the potential for introspection on our current societal divisions. However, the film’s execution, hampered by thin characterization, a lackluster narrative and an overreliance on spectacle over substance, left me disengaged.” 

“Civil War” will open in theaters on April 12. 

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