Alex Garland’s Civil War begins as a beleaguered President of the United States practices a speech before addressing the nation. Through a carefully crafted vocabulary of stern language, this president (the always fantastic and often underestimated Nick Offerman) clearly values the appearance of strength, even if his tone suggests he might be a coward of the highest order.
As he rehearses what is clearly a propagandistic and politically exaggerated recitation, news and video footage of recent real-life unrest is peppered throughout his many outtakes. The uneasy chaos created by this contrast of words and images sets a foreboding tone that not only lingers throughout Civil War but expertly mirrors the deep feeling of uncertainty and fear felt by many Americans for some time now.
The very real causes of these feelings are almost always the same – media manipulation, public gaslighting, fear-mongering, and deliberately manufactured racial divides, to name just a few – but how this “information” is received and acted upon is often determined by whether you prefer red signs in your yard or blue ones.
But what if these brightly colored lines drawn in the sand weren’t so apparent? Or what if they didn’t matter at all, and people acted on their conscience regardless of which team currently held the political football? What if whole swaths of Americans put aside their made-up differences and fought our corrupt power structures together?
Civil War is told through the eyes of dispassionate and objective war correspondents (Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, and Stephen McKinley Henderson), a clever device that allows Garland to present us with the “who,” “what,” “where,” and “how” of his near-dystopian world without ever delving into the “why.” That part he leaves to us, and what each of us comes away with may be uncomfortably telling of our levels of empathy, compassion, or possibly even bloodlust.
To this end, Civil War asks us to ponder this all-important journalistic checkbox despite it never divulging any political specifics. By not allowing us to choose sides, Garland has stripped us of much of what divides us in the first place: some other dipshit’s opinion about the state of the world. Just like the President’s opening speech, Civil War is a fantasy – a fabrication or speculation of what the world might look like if pressed too far – and it’s up to us to discern the truth from the lies and act accordingly once we’ve done so.
But, despite his lack of outward team spirit, Garland still offers a number of clues as to who the “good” guys and “bad” guys are. That is to say, Civil War sharply and artistically sneaks in a number of topical issues that exemplify the often terrifying and always idiotic core of our current state of affairs. But again, he leaves them up to us to find, decipher, and ultimately interpret according to our own sense of right and wrong.
James is a writer, skateboarder, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.