It’s been two weeks since I saw Alex Garlands Civil War, and I still can’t get the scary last few minutes out of my head. Several important things happen in the final moments of the film that add an avalanche of emotions to everything you were already feeling. The film is powerful and exciting enough on its own – but then, at the very end, you feel sadness, shock, relief, pride, excitement and more in a brief moment before the credits roll. I don’t know about you, but I had to sit in stunned silence for a few minutes before I left.
Recently io9 spoke to the Film writer/director Alex Garland and asked him about his inspirations for the ending and how it all came together.
To recap: In the middle of the battle in Washington DC, Lee (Kirsten Dunst), Joel (Wagner Moura) and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) find themselves in the White House. The soldiers shadowing them move deeper into the building as Secret Service agents begin to move in to defend the president. While trying to take the perfect photo, Jessie ends up in the line of fire and is shortly shot dead. Lee jumps in front of the bullet and we see her get killed as Jessie takes a series of stills from the ground as Lee stands over her and then falls.
“It’s a bit of cinema grammar of a passing of the baton,” Garland said of Lee’s death and how he depicted it. “The interesting thing about it is inserting still images into moving images that are actually still images and just flicker past us. And as far as the course of the film is concerned, it’s a kind of transference of states from an older character to a younger character. It just felt like the right way to describe that moment.”
Interestingly, Garland admitted that he played around with and changed the moment during editing. “It wasn’t written as a series of shots of someone taking pictures and squirming and taking pictures and squirming,” Garland said. “It was written as a single captured image… a perfect piece of photography. But the sequence actually contained a bit more power on average. So I decided to do that instead.”
After Lee dies, Jessie and Joel have no time to mourn and must move on to find the president, which they do. He is about to be executed when Joel asks the soldiers not to do it yet so he can get an offer. “Don’t kill me,” he says. And then they do it. Jessie is there to take the picture.
And so the film’s credits roll as Jessie’s photo of the soldiers over the president’s body slowly emerges. “The film tries to get in touch with reality in a certain way [other] as a cinema,” Garland said of the decision. “So the grammar often comes from lived experience, news photography, news footage or documentaries. That’s his kind of framework. And you actually find this trophy photo with a person as a trophy again and again. It literally happens exactly the way you see it. So there’s something that felt appropriate to the photography and the protagonists and their journey, but was also actually real. So a strange, disturbing final break in reality at the end of the film.”
Civil War is now in the cinema.
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