Much like Nope and The Zone Of Interest before it, Civil War interrogates the ethics of image-making amidst tragedy. It's much less about a metaphorical Red Vs. Blue and more about the literal Red Green Blue color model; instead of getting into the specifics of the war, we follow journalists/thrillseekers documenting urban combat on a road trip to interview their fascistic President. You can easily parcel out why the war started and other details from subtle world-building nods, but it's still an incredibly vague conflict to us.
Garland mines tension from that inexactness, insomuch as there are no easily definable Good or Bad guys, so paranoia is perpetual. He isn't playing a game of craven centrism, because that would be an attempt to appeal to both sides, which would betray the story he chose to tell. Instead, he's directly honed in on characters who think they're impartial, thus the movie reflects their worldview. Our lead, Lee, tells her devoted young fan and hopeful protegé, Jessie, after a scary encounter that it's not their job to question what they see because "Once you start asking yourself [those] questions you can't stop. So we don't. We record so other people ask. Wanna be a journalist? That's the job." Jessie internalizes this and suppresses her emotions.
Their impartiality is what's dangerous because it erodes their humanity. Civil War asks us to examine what it means to not intervene but to stand on the inside and make moments of misery into spectacle. Every sequence we watch them duck and cover and scurry around soaring bullets all while pointing their cameras at dying people. Once the firing has stopped and they take a breather to go over their camera roll, they either frown about their shots of carnage being out of focus or get a dopamine hit out of snapping that One Perfect Shot (again, it's a shot of someone bleeding out on the sidewalk).
One of the most powerful character moments comes toward the beginning of the third act when Lee decides to actually delete a[n admittedly beautiful but tragic] photo. From that moment on she can barely function how she's been for the first ⅔ of the movie because deleting that photo, choosing her humanity over her Art, makes all the noise she's shut out unbearably loud. In those moment she lets herself feel again.
Garland has this great stylistic flourish throughout where, every time Lee starts to dissociate, the red, green, and blue color values in lights at the edges of the frame start to separate. It never lasts too long and he doesn't call attention to it; we'll see it start to happen, it'll cut away to a shot of something else, and when we cut back they're seemingly fine again. He does this multiple times until, at the very end, it happens to Jessie and it feels like watching her succumb to a zombie bite. This is the the note Garland ends on: us not knowing if she's ever going to be okay again. We watch her first photo, taken after this transformation, develop over the credits and it's the most fitting ending for a movie about how images are all about what we bring to them.
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