Short answer: no. Slightly longer answer: absolutely not.
Civil War had a huge budget, a whopping $50 million. The largest of any A24 film, which is evident, as they clearly had no idea how to use this money. This film follows a group of photo-journalists as they travel from New York to Washington D.C. in an attempt to interview the president during a civil war. If you’re wondering who to root for in this civil war, or what could possibly make California and Texas join forces, so am I. This film never explains that, which has the potential to be an interesting angle, but in reality, feels like lazy writing and a desire to stay apolitical. This position almost never works in film, especially here where there are parts of the film where you are clearly meant to sympathise with one side, but the next moment your feelings are supposed to lie with the other. Without knowing what each side stands for, you end up feeling deflated and manipulated.
Back to the budgeting problem, as an independent production company that has started to gain more and more traction in the past few years, it appears as though no one in the editing side really knew what to do with so much money. It seems the majority of it was spent on the intense, detailed action scenes, which were, admittedly, impressive, but the lack of substance anywhere else in the film made it seem as though it was a sequence of action scenes with a thin plot jumbled in between.
While the acting in this film was decent, the writing was stilted and the character development downright bad. We’re expected to believe that a young woman who 48 hours prior froze at the action instead of photographing it and just 24 hours prior was throwing up in the backseat next to a dead man she barely knew, was suddenly capable of jumping in front of bullets just to get a good photo. Two days is not long enough for that kind of character development so why bother to put it in? Similarly, Kirsten Dunst’s character Lee seems to be perfectly fine photographing the dying moment of anybody if it takes a good photo, but as soon as it’s someone she knows, she deletes the photo. Almost as if she recognises how disrespectful it is…
Alex Garland seems to believe he’s done something in this post-January 6th modern USA “anti-war” film, however he’s just missed the mark on every single message, choosing to jumble several together, instead of picking one and properly developing it into something substantial.
overall rating = 1/5
See my 2024 rankings here