Last Saturday night I sat in the living room and watched Alex Garland’s new movie, Civil War. And it was not worth my 109 minutes.

Civil War was released to American viewers on April 26, 2024, and made a box office of 122.5 million. It was rated R as an action/adventure movie, which I felt was lacking.

The cinematography was done by Rob Hardy, who is known to frequently collaborate with Alex Garland. The movie featured many close-up, high-quality shots with a lack of dialogue.

The movie felt unsubstantiated with a missed opportunity. With such an interesting concept of US political aggressions, leading to an American civil war, all in the eyes of journalists. 

The main plot focused on four journalists, journaling life in America’s Civil War, with a goal to get to Washington DC coming from New York City in hopes of interviewing the President.

What I found most hard to follow was the plot of the actual war and what the context of the story was. I think that this is important to the context because it helps the viewer understand on a deeper level the story. With little context, it’s harder to want to watch the story if it’s hard to understand.

Although one of the strengths of the movie was that the actors did a phenomenal job. The cast was all A-list, and although that doesn’t automatically mean the movie will be better, it does mean that there

Playing the main role of Jessie was Cailee Spaeney, who we recently saw in Sophia Coppola’s movie Priscilla. Coming out of her new movie, her works after were expected to be just as popular and her acting in Civil War was amazing. I felt like she helped move the movie with her acting and the movie was easier to watch with an actor as great as Spaeney. Even though there was controversy with her casting, reviewers wondered why cast an actor who had played a teenager in her most recent roles to play a 23-year-old. This just adds more confusion to the plot.

The other protagonist was Lee Smith, played by Kristen Dunst, a popular actor in the 90s and 2000s, that your parents will most likely know. She played her character well and realistically adding more depth to the film.

Them together in a movie was phenomenal. Their acting complemented their roles very well, making the character development not as weak as it was written.

The idea of the movie has a deep and interesting meaning, but the movie feels shallow and safe when talking about such a heavy topic of war. This made the movie feel empty and unfinished. Civil War was rated as “action” when the only action well worth watching was in the last 30 minutes of the 1 hour and 49 minutes of the movie.

In conclusion, the movie wasn’t all bad, it had so much potential to be a classic, but unfortunately, it fell through. Personally, I do not recommend wasting your money to watch this movie.