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Set in a dystopian future of the United States of America, “Civil War” (2024) by Alex Garland is one of the least “Hollywood” movies Hollywood has produced recently. What we have come to associate with most productions that come out of the American film industry in the past 10 years, if not more, is an unpleasant and disappointing reduce-reuse-recycle process of storylines, scores, filming techniques, and even entire films because of the whole live-action-remake craze.

“Civil War” escapes the box with its simplicity and timeliness. While it was released in March of this year, its full potential as a social commentary on the consequences of the divide in U.S. society has now revealed itself.

The film follows a group of photojournalists racing through a war-torn U.S. in an unspecified future to get to the capital for an interview with the President. As they pass through the country on backroads that get closer and closer to the frontline of the civil war, we see little bits and pieces of a broken America. The side characters they encounter and interact with act as a collective image of certain social groups in the States that we can recognize even today. The young White thugs who target people of color, the extreme nationalists, the second or third-generation immigrants, the opportunists who still believe in the American dream, and the bystanders who consciously avoid recognizing the crisis they are living through: in the past year, we have met all these people online. The only difference between them and the characters in “Civil War” is that the Americans in the film do not hide behind a screen to share their opinions, however harmful. It is almost as if writer-director Alex Garland sends out a warning about what extreme politics can lead to if left to fester.

The film masterfully interrogates the role of journalists in such conflicts. The added complexity of a civil war is that the journalists really have to choose which side to give a voice to, revealing their own bias and inserting themselves into their stories in a far more emotional manner than expected. That, however, Garland argues with his film, does not undermine a story. His choice of focusing the film on a group of war photojournalists is intentional because in photography, as essayist Susan Sontag articulates, one must constantly ask oneself what the photographer chooses to keep behind their back. In her longer essay “Regarding the Pain of Others,” Sontag argues how this is especially important to consider when it comes to war photography. She says that the true mission of a photojournalist is “to chronicle their own time, be it a time of war or a time of peace, as fair-minded witnesses free of chauvinistic prejudices.” That seems, however, to be an impossible task. Even if the perception of photojournalism is that it is the most realistic representation of an event – we, the audience, get to see things as they were at the time they happened, almost from the first hand – the question of what the journalist decided to memorialize becomes omnipresent. And a journalist's decision might be influenced by what they would consider the marketability of a picture.

Sontag goes on to explore what the market value of a picture of the horrors of war could be. She argues that “the appetite for pictures showing bodies in pain is as keen, almost, as the desire for ones that show bodies naked.” She gives the example of depictions of hell in Christian art traditions as embodying both, the implication being that a warscape is a hellscape. Then why should we, the viewers, be subjected to seeing this at all? Sontag proposes that we actually seek to spectate the pain of others: “No moral charge attaches to the representation of these cruelties. Just the provocation: can you look at this? There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching. There is the pleasure of flinching.” That moment of flinching is exactly what the journalists in “Civil War” wait for: they aim their cameras and wait for the moment of absolute horror before they press the button and shoot the image. There is, in a way, a double death of the subjects of their photographs of this speculative American civil war: the shot from the gun of their enemy and the shot of the photographer on the sidelines, giving them an eternal life in pain.

Post-election results, when many far-right devotees revealed themselves, the tensions across the U.S. became worrisomely close to the kinds of micro-conflicts Garland presents in his film “Civil War”. As more and more speculations arise on the role of media in determining the results of the elections and how they represented the candidates in writing and pictures, Garland’s thriller becomes a must-watch for anybody even remotely interested in the American politics and journalism nexus.