Rating: /5
IMAX is hell. War is meaningless. This movie is a lot of things.
Lee is a world-famous photojournalist known for her disturbing and frank photos from war-torn areas. Her head is full of people that she watched die.
We don't ask questions. We take the shot so someone else can ask them later.
She and her colleague Joel plan to get the ultimate photo — a picture of the president. Their aging colleague Sammy calls it a suicide mission but tags along because, like all photojournalists, they have massive FOMO.
Jessie is a young, up-and-coming photojournalist. She idolizes Lee and takes the opportunity to tell her when she sees her at a riot/bombing. Through some finagling with Joel, and to Lee’s disappointment, Jessie joins in on the journey.
Sammy and Joel say they see a young Lee in Jessie. Lee sees someone who still has an out and is taking a road with no return.
I've never been more scared in my life. I've also never felt so alive.
The filmmakers shot the film in a narrow depth of field. Even when two characters stand beside each other, one is out of focus — because this is a story about the narrow field of vision that photojournalism gives us.
We like to believe in the objective photo — or at least the photo with enough truth to consider worthwhile. For as long as photography has existed, it has gone to war-torn areas to send a message home and hopefully keep what’s happening in the war zone from happening at home.
This movie is called Civil War because it happens during a theoretical civil war on American soil. But the movie is only interested in that story as much as its characters are. These photojournalists took the photos to stop the war from coming to America. And they failed.
If you look for a social message or commentary in this movie, you will be disappointed. By design, it plays at a similar “objectivity” that photojournalism claims, allowing the characters and their responses to what is happening around them to tell the story.
One photographer, after a sniper shoots at them, finds a good angle for a photo. Another lays in the grass and looks at the beautiful flowers while men in uniform with no voiced allegiance work on taking out the sniper.
By looking at a photographer at the beginning of their career and one on board to the bitter end, we see the hunger that gets them going and the cost of years of desensitization.
People die — characters we get to know as well as strangers caught up in the fight. We watch and do not intervene. Some characters even pick up their camera to capture it.
I don’t know how I feel about this movie yet, but I sure am thinking about it.
Edit 2024-04-09: I’ve decided I like the fact it isn’t easy to feel definitive about the movie.