‘Civil War’ Imagines America’s Worst-Case Scenario Right Around the Corner
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America is in a rough place right now — perhaps you’ve heard. Right vs. left, blue vs. red, blind faith vs. biased truth. What was once an ideological divide now seems like an unbridgeable chasm. No one can seem to agree on simple concepts like, say, “facts” or “reality.” Historians like to point to the 1860s, when the future face of our $5 bill attempted to preserve our union while brother fought against brother — or even more recently, 1968, that annus horriblis of riots and assassinations and moral free-falls — as the rock bottom of our nation. Given the election year we’re in and the feeling that we’re about to reprise a truly contentious contest for the country’s highest office, however, it’s hard not to think we’re on the brink of a second conflict between citizens on our own soil. It can happen here. It can happen again. We do seem to love sequels.
Alex Garland’s Civil War faces this what-if concept head on, imagining a future so very not-so-distant that you might accidentally mistake it for the present, in which the USA is once more at war against itself. The premise is a perfect opportunity to take a cold, hard, genre-inflected look at the American experiment’s current slouching toward self-destruction — the only question is whether Garland’s wild potboiler wants to explore or exploit our state of the nation, and the jury’s still out on that. Besides being one of the most interesting and genuinely fearless filmmakers working today, the British writer-director behind Ex Machina (2014), Annihilation (2018), and the vastly underrated Men (2022) has never been one to shy away from poking at sociological wounds and existential pressure points. (The same applies to his brilliant TV show for FX, Devs.) He’s never less than 100-percent thought-provoking. This time out, however, it’s hard not to occasionally feel that the second word of that descriptive is being favored at the expense of the first.
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We’re already in the new normal from the very beginning, dropped en media res into massive, roiling attacks between the U.S. government and various factions of secessionists, ranging from the “Florida Alliance” to the “Western forces of Texas and California.” Not even the states that share similar political leanings and a common enemy can stay united when the shit goes down, it seems. The President (Nick Offerman, turning his lovable Libertarian persona from Parks & Recreation on its head) is addressing the country, touting victories against the various rebel factions. Garland is purposefully keeping exposition to a minimum, lest folks immediately get hung up on partisan details and easy, binary versions of good guys and bad guys. But he’s clearly presenting an authoritarian behind that podium with the POTUS seal; even before you find out he’s issued air strikes against American citizens, disbanded the FBI, and is either seeking or is already serving his third consecutive term in office, you clock that you’re listening to a TV-savvy dictator. The movie assumes you’ll see any IRL connections immediately, fill in the blanks yourself, and don’t need things spelled out. Besides, it suggests, isn’t this problem bigger than just one politician?
Well yes, of course it is and also, in this country circa 2024, no it isn’t, but again, Civil War is not trying to traffic in specific parallels. Or specificity at all, which is what makes this worst-case-scenario procedural a sometimes frustrating, maddeningly opaque affair. What it wants to do is show folks across the Op-Ed spectrum what things might actually be like should the next logical domino fall, and the government decides to treat these divided states as a hostile power.
It’s not a coincidence that our tour guides are war photographers and journalists, the exemplars of “objectivity” and both of whom are considered enemy combatants by the administration for bearing witness. Lee (Kirsten Dunst) is a legend among her battlezone-shutterbug peers, and along with her longtime journalist partner Joel (Wagner Moura), she’s covered atrocities all over the globe. Having to document firefights and military pushback in her own backyard, however, has left her not just weary but haunted. The thousand-yard stare in her eyes is in danger of becoming permanent.
When a suicide bomber attacks the National Guard during a protest, Lee ends up shielding a young woman near the blast. This is Jesse (Priscilla‘s Cailee Spaeny). It turns out she’s an aspiring war photographer herself, and is jazzed to meet Lee. Maybe this veteran could give her some tips? Lee politely declines. Like us, she’s not sure whether this bright-eyed twentysomething is a fangirl, a plant, or the second coming of Eve Harrington. Yet the next morning, Jesse has insinuated herself into their traveling group, which includes Sammy (the great Stephen McKinley Henderson), a scribe who files for “whatever is left of The New York Times.” They’re heading to D.C., in the hope that one of them can somehow get the first interview with the commander in chief in 14 months. There are also rumors of a big push by the resistance into the Capitol. It’s supposed to take place, appropriately, on the fourth of July.
From there, Civil War takes us on a quick and dirty tour of American life during wartime, not from sea to shining sea but throughout the scorched earth that lies between them. Various stops along the way range from ominous (a rural gas station that doubles as a prisoner-of-war torture chamber) to heartening (a Hooverville-type enclave where folks try to forge a semblance of a community). One detour in particular, involving two of Joel’s old buddies, Jesse Plemons’ eerily calm solider, and a mass grave, is almost unbearably tense — imagine Annihilation‘s “scream bear” sequence with a good ol’ boy standing in for the creature, and you get the drift. Sometimes, they run across red-state caricatures and mercenaries in madras shirts wielding machine guns. Every so often, they find the human equivalent of head-in-sand ostriches: “We just try to stay out of it,” says one shop owner, before she tries to sell Joel a hat.
Those folks — the ones who act like all politics aren’t personal, that can afford the luxury to tune out the artillery fire and ignore lines of displaced families along the roadside, that look and act just like you and me — are targets for Garland’s rage as much as the fascist leaders and overly enthusiastic Rambo wannabes. Should you come into Civil War looking for left-wing jingoism and/or alt-right paranoia, we wish you good luck and godspeed. Ditto cold comfort, catharsis, and/or cheap thrills. If you’re in the mood for some blunt-force jibes at complacency, however? Welcome! That, and some fatalistic, nightmarish imagery straight outta “Desolation Row,” are what the price of a ticket will get you. It’s set up in a way that could veer into either Strangelovian satire or semi-vérité conspiracy thriller, but what Garland and his admittedly stellar cast (especially Dunst) have made is a horror film constructed, Frankenstein-like, from a thousand doomscrolls. And yes: Seeing a recognizable USA in tatters and ruins, not to mention a tank menacingly loitering on Park Avenue, will indeed chill you to the bone.
But to what end? Civil War offers a lot of food for thought on the surface, yet you’re never quite sure what you’re tasting or why, exactly. No one wants a PSA or easy finger-pointing here, any more than you would have wanted Garland’s previous film Men — as unnerving and nauseating a film about rampant toxic masculinity as you’ll ever come across — to simply scream “Harvey Weinstein!” at you. And the fact that you can view its ending in a certain light as hopeful does suggest that, yes, this country has faced countless seismic hurdles and yet we still endure to form a more perfect union. Yet you’ll find yourself going back to that “explore or exploit” conundrum a lot during the movie’s near-two-hour running time. It’s feeding into a dystopian vision that’s already running in our heads. Things fall apart, the center cannot hold, etc. So why does this just feel like more of the same white noise pitched at a slightly higher frequency?
(This review originally ran as part Rolling Stone’s coverage of the 2024 SXSW Film Festival.)
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