Civil War is a brilliant and complicated look at a worst-case American scenario

Releasing a movie about a hypothetical second civil war in the year of a our lord 2024 almost begs you not to see it as provocation. As bewilderingly talented as Alex Garland is, he’s also not immune to popping off to make a point with a dystopian howitzer.

It’s hard to say A24’s blockbuster effort Civil War is anything but a statement, even with its shrewd avoidance to blatantly point specific fingers in specific directions. The British Garland is clearly disturbed by what’s happening stateside as an outsider as much as he’s seemingly skeptical that his Apocalypse Now-tinted, truly breathtaking war journalist road trip movie through a war-sieged America is all that far-fetched. His is a brilliant, complicated film, one that puts us into a nonsensical power grab battleground where you’re never sure who your enemy is (or decided who you want to fight against long ago).

While the specifics of what draws America into this state of disturbing disarray are fascinatingly opaque, the sheer force hits all the same. It makes sense on a thematic level for why Garland dangles little hints here and there for why this fictional Civil War goes down rather than just scream its causes with a bullhorn.

So much of why America is in such a tight spot right now comes from the echo chambers we’ve siloed ourselves to, ones that paint out whatever we disagree with to be malevolent storms on the horizon, and one that can lionize our own viewpoints into unfungible tenets free of grey matter. Everyone is the good guy in their own head, basically, and Garland feels very attune to that pernicious sense of self-righteousness as foundation for chaos without order.

It’s not to say Nick Offerman’s apparently fascistic president didn’t kick everything off in the movie by staying in office past his second term, nor does the blank-faced approach help us gather the geopolitical hurdles of California and Texas teaming up in these frightening war games.

One line about a specific moment of imaginary violence in this fictitious history captured by Kirsten Dunst’s jaded war photographer Lee Miller feels specifically engineered to upset either way it could be read. At least to Garland, that’s the point. As a republic falls, the film posits that everyone has a seat on the crashing plane, one that we paid for and in it hold at least some degree of responsibility.

Choosing to frame this pulse-shattering war thriller through the eyes of journalists headed to try and interview Offerman’s POTUS before a possible attack sharpens the wide commentary into something more pointed and piercing.

It interrogates our relationship with media, at how the objectivity to purely bear witness to mind-numbing atrocity might only serve, in some cases, to spark the rest of us to put our heads further down in the sand. Sure, the responsibility isn’t on the reporter to tell you how to react to something, but there is an uncomfortable middle ground that permeates between the warring factions of this broken America. Garland sketches extremists warring for control and goodness knows what else against a seemingly dense part of the population who is just trying to keep its head down and ignore the battles and bloodshed next door.

Somewhere around the second act, Dunst and her fellow reporters (Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Cailee Spaeny) come across a refugee camp filled with people who probably got caught in the middle without the resources to avoid displacement. It’s a brief moment of respite in a film filled with horrid images of people being tortured at gas stations, anonymous bodies lining the highways and random strangers shooting at each other simply because of logistical disconnect, but it hits as hard when you realize those folks are probably there because they don’t have the means to be elsewhere. Even when you don’t want to get involved, war still finds you.

There are questioned raised about the cost of documenting war, about the psyche and motive of journalists chasing adrenaline and suspending safety and even empathy to intervene in the service of a quote, photo and video. There are also concerns raised about the fragility of our fractured citizenry, of the inescapable erosion of our communal ability to exchange ideas with our neighbors, of how misinformation, distrust and bigotry rot out our foundations.

However, Civil War avoids trying to explicitly blame anyone specific or answer our problems as much as imagine a world where they manifest into a worst-case scenario. While that might rub some people the wrong way as a lack of conviction, it feels much more like a rallying cry to solve the grander issues we face as a country than throw support behind specific powers that be. The violent interactions hit hard because you see them on American soil, the punishing sound mix making every bullet fired feel intense and personal, like it’s hitting you in the chest as it’s shaking up your senses.

Is this movie apolitical? Perhaps less so than it is horrified about what a grand nation like America is capable of doing to itself. In that world, nobody gets out clean, not even the ones on the sideline. In the politics of reason, avoiding the mess altogether is always better than debating who made it. It’s up to us to find the better angels, if only because the lesser ones wear red sunglasses in military garb, fight for goodness knows who and have a clear question — What kind of American are you? — answered before you get a chance to reply.