Civil War (2024) **

Of all the problems facing America right now, it can do without this simplistic mess. Good idea, poor executed. Sure, I guess it’s meant to trigger intense debate about a divided country but seeing it through the prism of callous glory-hunting war reporters for whom you can’t extend a shred of sympathy isn’t the way to do it. And it’s as if these decades of alien invasion, with scenes of thousands of abandoned cars and the wanton destruction of every sacred man-made edifice, never existed.

It’s like a slasher movie. You got four candidates – make that six when two other guys join our little team with the sole purpose you quickly realize of being victims – for the slaughter and you can guess from the outset who’s not going to make it. We’ve seen these characters a hundred times before, in the more mainstream war picture, the hardened veteran trying to show the rookie the ropes while we know that more likely than not the newcomer is going to get the oldster killed.

By the time that happens we’re so inured to the sensitivities of these desensitized human beings that we’re hardly surprised when said youngster is only too delighted to take a snap of the person being killed and then, shock be hanged, I’m a true professional now, I’m just going to leap past her corpse because there’s the photo of the lifetime just waiting, the execution of the President.

The rights of war reporters I’m sure are enshrined in the Geneva Convention or in the Rules of War and it’s clearly every soldier’s duty to prevent them getting killed when they put themselves in harm’s way. There’s no doubt about the many famous war photographs but there’s equally been an ongoing debate about why a photographer deems it more important to take a picture of someone dying rather than to stop them dying.

They are meant to be neutral, that elusive get-out-of-jail-free card denied combatants, only in this case they break that golden rule and under threat themselves revert to killing.

The details of this war are pretty vague. For supposed switched-on journalists they don’t seem to have much idea of what exactly is going on, so the audience is just kept in the dark. And because they are neutrals, they can switch sides without the enemy noticing and, what’s more, manage to inveigle themselves with the troops about to storm the White House, said soldiers seemingly trained in the art of hand signals required to keep reporters from giving away their position and getting them all killed.

So we got three veterans, Lee (Kirsten Dunst), Joel (Wagner Moura) and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) who decide in the midst of this conflict to drive from New York to Washington (D.C. as we’re constantly reminded in case we think it’s the other city thousands of miles away) because Joel, who must be more famous than in his own head, wants an interview with the President because, in the midst of this conflagration, he’ll have nothing better to do than try and appease the “press” (as they’re in old-fashioned fashion known here rather than the contemporary “media”).

War photographer wannabe Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) cadges a ride and proceeds virtually the entire journey to venture into more dangerous territory, first up finding some looters strung up and bleeding to death and nothing to do for it but take a photo of the people who strung them up. There’s various shoot-outs and whatnots and it takes an age for the one character to appear that the trailer had us sold on, the racist Jesse Plemons, who forces them to take sides while digging a mass grave.

If this all meant to be a heavy-handed satire on the role of war journalists it pretty much succeeds, Joel determined not to let the President die before he gets the killer quote for which both will be remembered.

There’s not much any of the actors can do with such tightly prescribed roles. Kirsten Dunst (The Power of the Dog, 2021) does her best, tight-lipped and scrubbed clean of make-up to show she’s a serious actress when portraying a burnt-out character is always a shoo-in for an Oscar nomination. Poor Cailee Spaeny (Priscilla, 2023) has to go from shock to delight in seconds, but that twist is so unbelievable or so heinous, take your pick, it blows her character to hell.

In theory, this is sold as some kind of dystopian action picture in near-apocalyptic America, but that’s hardly going to work when every two seconds the action stops for, wait for it, a grainy black-and-white (black-and-white!!!) photo of the combatants. Written and directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina, 2014)

This promised much but ended up as a dubious snore-fest.