Just One Scene: Jesse Plemons in Civil War
For when you don’t want to talk about the whole movie, but you can’t stop thinking about a specific moment, character, or sequence, there’s Just One Scene.
“Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
For those of you somehow who didn’t experience Oppenheimer in 2023, well, what exactly were you doing? I’m not saying it’s perfect or should’ve won Best Picture, but still, what an experience! Josh Hartnett’s back! Benny Safdie applied the correct amount of sunscreen to counteract an atomic explosion! We got one of the strangest sex scenes of all time! And whence said scene of coitus interuptus doth concluded, we heard Cillian Murphy’s J. Robbert Oppenheimer speak the translated Sanskrit that would become associated with him for the rest of, well, forever: “Now I am become death, destroyer of worlds.”
While, yes, I can understand why that quote resonated with the person responsible for the most powerful form of human-on-human destruction up to that point in recorded history, I believe there’s another person that it can be applied to all too aptly. Well, a character really. And that’s Jesse Plemons’ unnamed “soldier” in Alex Garland’s Civil War.
While Plemons – who you might know as the unsettling neighbor/cop in the criminally underseen Game Night (seriously, watch that scene anytime you need a pick-me-up) or the neo-Nazi psychopath in the very-much-seen Breaking Bad – only gets seven minutes of total screen time in the movie, he makes the most of every second, every frame, every gesture. He plays a militaristic figure in rural Pennsylvania who happens upon Cailee Spaeny and Evan Lai’s characters after their car gets separated from their companion vehicle with Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Nelson Lee. The second car then finds the first one abandoned in front of a farmhouse and drives around back to find what can only be described as a nightmare at high noon.
The team from the second car walks up to Plemons as he holds their colleagues hostage – cloaked in camo, holding an AK, and giving orders to continue filling an enormous mass grave while he interrogates his five new friends. To say that he’s menacing would be childish. He’s a demon. He’s post-human. He doesn’t see people in front of, or behind, him, only threats. We have no way of really knowing what side of this war he’s on, other than the exchange that occurs between his and Moura’s characters after Moura begs him not to shoot them on account of their team being American. To which Plemons’ soldier asks:
It’s chilling because you know he has a right and wrong answer pre-determined in his head for each of them, yet the characters don’t know what responses will weigh just heavily enough on his pointer finger to pull the trigger. It turns out if you were born in another country or stutter too much out of fear, that’s enough by itself.
Particularly though, it’s amazing to watch Dunst, who is married to Plemons in real life, react to this human filth as he plays 20 questions with her travel party. Funny enough, she actually suggested her husband for the role after the original actor didn’t work out. Having worked together previously on both Fargo (where they met) and The Power of the Dog, Dunst and Plemons obviously knew how to perform together on screen. But thinking of your spouse for a role that can only be described as the absolute grimmest of reapers is truly something. Maybe she knew her husband was made to play the destroyer of worlds. Or maybe she just wanted to see him try.
