Beyond Empathy: How Civil War Redefines the Anti-War Genre

Anti-war films have been a Hollywood staple since the release of the original All Quiet on the Western Front in 1930, evolving since then to reflect the ever-changing and violent landscape of war. Classics like Full Metal Jacket, Human Condition III, Grave of the Fireflies, 1917, and Schindler’s List have brilliantly approached the tragedy of war time and again, to the point of near oversaturation.

I recently watched the 2022 version of All Quiet on the Western Front, and while I enjoyed it and thought it was well made, I couldn’t help but feel that I, alongside the rest of the audience, was participating in a strange obsession with war. I mean, with the amount of anti-war films I’ve seen, I don’t need to be told that war is bad again. However, one recent film came to mind as having stood apart from the rest, not in terms of quality, but in its core approach to what an anti-war film in the 21st century needs to be. This film is Civil War, written and directed by Alex Garland.

To understand why Civil War stands out, we need to understand the genre of traditional anti-war films. There are two main camps that these films fall into: the soldier perspective and the civilian perspective. The former is defined by initial screentime dedicated to humanizing the protagonist(s), like in Full Metal Jacket or 1917 where we are given some time to breathe and understand the character at first before any real combat. Then, as the veil of honor behind combat is stripped away, and the horrors of war reach our character, we see them deeply affected. They either become a violent shell of themselves or collapse under the weight of war. For example, in Full Metal Jacket, we see Private Gomer Pyle go through such intense dehumanization before even reaching the frontlines, to the point that he turns from a sweet boy to an empty man, eventually killing both his drill sergeant and himself. Films like All Quiet on the Western Front cover the development of wartime PTSD as young and innocent yet bloodthirsty  men go to war and return with extreme trauma or not at all.

Other anti-war films pivot the focus to the civilians who bear the brunt of war’s consequences. Isao Takahata’s heartbreaking Grave of the Fireflies offers a haunting portrayal of two siblings, Seita and Setsuko, who struggle to survive amid the firebombing of Japan in World War II, and follows them as they endure starvation, isolation, and grief. Similarly, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List centers on Holocaust victims, portraying the resilience of the human spirit in the face of unimaginable cruelty.

Both of these approaches focus on making their point by invoking empathy in the viewer. They create and develop their characters and then present you with a hell that they must face, leading to the tragic death, be it spiritual or physical, of the character. Clearly, this formula makes for great films; however, we must consider if they truly serve as anti-war movies anymore.

Alex Garland’s Civil War takes a different route, reframing the narrative from personal suffering to a critique of war as a societal and ideological construct. The film’s central figure, a journalist, is neither soldier nor civilian, but instead an unaffected observer. Whereas films like All Quiet on the Western Front and Grave of the Fireflies evoke empathy through intimate storytelling, Civil War deliberately creates distance. The journalist’s role as a detached bystander mirrors the audience’s position, forcing viewers to confront their own desensitization to violence. This critique of war as a spectacle consumed by outsiders adds a layer of discomfort absent in traditional anti-war narratives.

Fundamentally, the traditional anti-war movie tells you that war will devastate your life, and the lives of the people you know and love. However, in the modern war, you can be a soldier and kill multitudes with the press of a button without ever leaving your cozy office or confronting the aftermath of your actions. There are no more frontlines: only short, tactical operations. Unlike in the past, where you had to sit with what you’ve done, and live within the hell you helped create, war is now something that happens somewhere else. We are always on its periphery, even when it happens in our very own country, which is the case in Civil War. To our knowledge, there is no draft in the film, and you won’t be shot for deserting; no one is forcing you to fight. It holds a mirror to modern war, where soldiers and civilians are able to absentmindedly contribute to an ongoing war without having the slightest notion of the machine that they are embedded in.

Another significant difference lies in how these films position the audience. In Grave of the Fireflies and Schindler’s List, viewers are engaged witnesses, emotionally invested in the characters’ survival. The films compel audiences to empathize and, by extension, condemn the societal failures that allowed such tragedies to occur. Civil War, however, critiques the audience’s passivity. By mirroring the journalist’s detached perspective, the film challenges viewers to consider their role as consumers of war stories. Civil War juxtaposes scenes of soldiers wiping out an enemy camp with Say No Go by De La Soul; presents horrifying displays of war only for the characters to blankly snap a picture and move on. We are inundated with war content under the guise of opposing it, but the constant exposure itself serves only to acclimate us to it, turning war into a spectacle that fuels media profits and satisfies our morbid curiosity and misplaced sense of activism. When violence is only shown for the sake of violence, isolated from context that allows us to feel compassion for the victims, it is difficult to feel much more than shock. What happens when this shock fades over prolonged exposure to this media? Are we complicit in normalizing violence by merely watching? This discomfort sets Civil War apart, making it less about generating sympathy and more about fostering introspection.

Civil War has scenes emphasizing compassion and highlighting the horrors of war like the other films discussed in this article, but it shines in asking more fundamental questions about the roles of the news media, anti-war film, and audience, in propagating the war machine. War has changed, and if we must rely on building empathy for its victims to condemn it, what happens when a society is able to remove the possibility for this empathy? Alex Garland identifies this missing humanity, and pushes us to think about how we engage with media, in the hopes of making an anti-war movie that can speak to us in the modern world.