The most harrowing, visceral scene among many in Alex Garland's Civil War takes place on the streets of Washington DC, which has become an intense combat zone. In a very near-future when seceding states are rebelling against the authoritarian US government, helicopters fly overhead and explosions hit the Lincoln Memorial. Near the White House, journalists hide from gunfire behind armoured military vehicles. Garland puts us in the centre of a stomach-churning fictional battle that feels all too real, especially in light of the real violence in the US Capitol on 6 January 2021.
Yet the heart of film is not in US politics. The dynamic plot, in fact, is more about journalists' important role as witnesses to war. Lee, a famous photojournalist (Kirsten Dunst), begins the film already looking exhausted from covering brutal conflicts. She and Joel (Wagner Moura), a reporter, hope to interview the president (Nick Offerman), who has disbanded the FBI and ordered the military to attack ordinary citizens. In response to his regime, rebellious states have formed different alliances, including the unlikely Texas-California partnership of the so-called Western Forces.
Civil War focuses on a group of journalists documenting the conflict, including newbie Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) (Credit: A24)
As these reporters travel through the war-torn country from New York to DC, Garland's point becomes clear. A young man at a gas station proudly shows Lee the writhing, bloodied bodies of two men he has hanged by their wrists. "I went to high school with him," he says, pointing to one man. "He didn't talk to me much." Men in unmarked combat gear shoot at snipers in a farmhouse. "Someone's trying to kill us. We are trying to kill them," one of them tells Joel, who incredulously asks "And you don't know what side they're fighting for?" Shooting at the other side because it is the Other, killing because of xenophobia or just plain spite – that is the danger Civil War is about.
Garland has made a brilliantly executed war movie that is anti-war, a political film determined to be apolitical in its details. Most of all it is a chilling, believable warning for the US and by extension countries around the world. "It's a film about the product of polarisation and division," as Garland told CBS in one of many such comments. "Unless we come to our senses, our polarised, divisive, non-communicative state is going to continue."
Garland makes the future his protagonists travel through especially unsettling and close to home, because it so deftly combines the familiar and the strange
To convey that message, Garland creates an effective if too-neat array of generations. Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) fills the slot of a sage elder reporter, who warns Lee and Joel, "They shoot journalists on sight in the capitol. They consider us enemy combatants." Yet he joins them on the trip toward DC, hoping for one last go-round. Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) a talented young aspiring photojournalist who idolises Lee, talks her way into the car too, joining the increasingly dangerous trek.
Garland makes the future they travel through especially unsettling and close to home, because it so deftly combines the familiar and the strange. Protesters on the streets of New York facing off against the New York Police Department is a recognizable scene, until the protestors are fired on by the US military. Lee and Joel's white van with Press written on the side is what is routinely seen by US viewers in news reports from foreign wars. And it can't be a coincidence that one scene is set at a Western Forces military base in Charlottesville, Virginia, site of a notorious 2017 white supremacist rally. The city's name itself now bristles with political division.
More like this
- 10 of the best films to watch in April
- The paranoid thriller more relevant than ever
- Eternal Sunshine's warnings about modern love
Garland wrote Civil War in 2020, and has acknowledged on The Daily Show and elsewhere that the violence in the Washington scene resonates more strongly after the events of 6 January. In that same Daily Show interview, though, he emphasised that the film is not entirely about the US – that polarisation and ignoring journalists who point out the truth is happening in "your country [US], my country [UK], many other countries".
Civil War's imagery of a militarised US is deeply unsettling (Credit: A24)
Civil War seems not only to speak to such deep societal dangers, but also to anticipate them, as Garland's films often do. His screenplay for Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later (2002) imagined a global plague years before Covid. That infection turned people into zombies, but still, it was a warning. A decade ago in the sleek Ex Machina, which he wrote and directed, he considered the thin line between artificial intelligence and sentient beings, taking a swipe at tech billionaires along the way.
His most perfectly realised film, Ex Machina holds up beautifully today. Garland has dismissed the idea that he is especially prescient, though, and said he is merely observing the world. Now he is observing polarisation, and the world seems ready to prove his point. Civil War itself began drawing sharply divided political reactions before anyone in the public had viewed it, mirroring the kind of division Garland depicts so explosively. The conversation around the film is almost as revealing as what is on screen.
What the reaction to the film showsOne early article relied on a Reddit group, which the piece characterised as "from the left side of the political spectrum", grumbling that the yet-unseen film might incite violence. An even earlier piece reported how the film had inspired conspiracy theories from the right, alleging that it reflected a real-life plan by those in power to create disorder. The hair-on-fire anticipation echoes early fears about The Joker (2019), which never inspired the copycat violence predicted by the advance hand-wringing. But this polarised reaction indicates that Garland's timely film has really hit a nerve.
After the film premiered at SXSW in March, he and the cast started doing interviews, emphasising its non-political stance, but not always clearing things up. Garland attempted to explain the baffling alliance between conservative-leaning Texas and liberal-leaning California, which is never addressed in the film. He told The Hollywood Reporter that the partnership says, "Two sides that have a different political position have said, 'Our political differences are less important than this' [resisting a fascist president]." After giving a similar answer to the Financial Times he added, "To me that is such a small, logical step, but it's interesting that people find it so problematic."
At best, though, the concept of that alliance is wildly idealistic, and idealistic is not how this film lands. Near-realism is its strength, and showing such an unlikely collaboration doesn't serve that. Some recent polls suggest that Americans are united in their beliefs in the core values of democracy. However a study for the Carnegie Endowment goes beyond that. "Even though Americans are not as ideologically polarised as they believe themselves to be, they are emotionally polarised (known as affective polarisation). In other words, they do not like members of the other party." In this notable instance, Garland doesn't help his own case by sidestepping how red v blue animosity seems to be at the root of the US divide.
Garland's first film as screenwriter, 28 Days Later, showed his propensity for exploring perilous future scenarios (Credit: Alamy)
The actors have kept to their talking points. Offerman, asked on the red carpet before a preview screening if his character was based on Donald Trump, said no, that the character is "unattached to anything in modern politics". He's right insofar as the fictional president does not look or sound like any specific real-life person. On the same red carpet, Moura said: "The film doesn't have a political agenda, you really cannot say that this is a liberal film, a conservative film." Similar comments, all true enough, go on and on through multiple cast interviews, bolstering the film's refusal to take sides.
But Garland himself has said the film is political, including during a Q&A panel after a New York screening this week. He flatly said he was getting annoyed that so many journalists said it was not. "It's an intensely political film," he explained, but one that doesn't spell things out, with him providing "dots that can be brought together" and connected according to individual political opinions. "This [fictional] president is a fascist," he noted, adding that he didn't know how many more dots anyone needed to go on.
What seems political to Garland clearly does not mean the same to some of its critics, especially those who expected and might want more pointed commentary. But then those viewers really want Civil War to be a different film instead of the devastatingly real warning it is. It may have been written four years ago, but landing now in the midst of a tight US presidential election seems just the right time for a film that speaks so powerfully to a divided country, even if viewers have to connect the dots themselves.
Civil War is out in US and UK cinemas on 12 April.
--
If you liked this story, sign up for The Essential List newsletter – a handpicked selection of features, videos and can't-miss news delivered to your inbox every Friday.
If you would like to comment on this story or anything else you have seen on BBC Culture, head over to our Facebook page or message us on X.