‘It is always the image that someone chose; to photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.’

Susan Sontag, Regarding the Pain of Others

Shoot first, ask questions later. It’s a phrase that applies equally to the combat soldiers and the photojournalists at the heart of Civil War. From the opening scene to the provocative closing credits, Alex Garland’s new film follows a team of old-school correspondents who document a near-future dystopian United States at war with itself. They constantly insert themselves into the middle of skirmishes for the shot. A dogmatic devotion to capturing the moment is what drives both the plot and its characters. They are individuals with no backstory, married to the profession even as it destroys them psychologically. Through their unwavering lenses the audience observes this civil war, as well as the interpersonal dramas that unfold within it. But are those lenses really as ‘objective’, or even as ‘anti-war’, as director Alex Garland intended them to be?