"Civil War" is Not About Civil War
A24's first attempt at a blockbuster plays on our fears of American apocalypse.
Civil War has a misleading title. Ever since A24 released a provocative trailer for the film back in December—a trailer which featured apocalyptic images of civil unrest, dilapidated buildings, and lawless militiamen tearing apart our good United States—audiences went up in arms. Because, as it turns out, the notion that our present era of American history could witness something as terrifying as a full-blown secessionist movement (that emerges against an authoritarian US president, no less) was the perfect controversy-bait for an American populace, around 40% of whom believe that a second American Civil War is just around the corner.
And while coastal liberals wrote their thinkpieces and the MAGA crowd spouted their conspiracy theories, A24 were foaming at the mouth, thrilled that their first attempt to branch out from their emo shit by finally funding a movie with big explosions was hitting the political nerve centers of its anxiety-ridden American audiences. The clickbait worked: As of the time of this writing, Civil War has taken over $112 million worldwide on a $50 million budget. (Perhaps more significantly, the film’s success has pulled in audiences from red and blue states alike—a political thriller with an unusually non-partisan audience.)
The reason for the film’s success, I think, is that Civil War is not actually about civil war. Yes, it envisions a world of imminent political violence arriving on American soil, but Civil War—a muscular, feel-bad work of political apprehension from writer-director Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation, Men)—is less interested in predicting a political apocalypse than in forcing us to consider just how apocalyptically we tend to think about our politics. It is more about the world we think we live in—a FUBAR society of political partisanship—than the world we actually live in, leaving us with a film far more thoughtful and considered than its trailer might suggest.
Civil War’s alt-history America begins with fascism. At some point in the recent past, the rise of an authoritarian US president (Nick Offerman, giving a performance that threads a Succession-like needle of both resembling and avoiding outright imitation of Donald Trump) inspires a series of secessionist rebellions by state governments. There are the Western Forces of Texas and California (known as the WF), a coalition formed against the president’s authoritarian agenda. There is the Florida Alliance, an ill-defined group of rabble-rousing Southern states. And there are the Loyalists, fascist zealots with white nationalist overtones. Our entry point into this world comes in the form of a group of ragtag journalists (played by Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Cailee Spaeny) journeying from New York City to Washington D.C., with a singular goal: to locate, interview, and photograph the president before his inevitable demise at the hands of the WF.
Such a goal does not come without its dangers, particularly in a post-apocalyptic United States whose environs bear more than a few resemblances to the recent HBO series The Last of Us. Highways are strewn with empty vehicles, long ago abandoned by passengers fleeing firefights or carpet bombings. Gas stations sell their typical goods and wares, but have turned into renegade outposts patrolled by AR-15-toting militiamen. The rooftops of suburban neighborhoods are dotted with merceneary snipers, scoping their surroundings for encroaching looters. These scenarios are eerie and off-putting, not because they feel out of this world, but because they feel so close to home. This is the currency in which Civil War trades: the discomforting familiarity of political violence that should feel far more alien.
To that end, it only makes sense that film’s protagonists are war journalists who are more than comfortable in war zones. Take Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), Civil War’s leading lady. A photojournalist who spent years documenting horrific conflicts around the world, Lee returns home to a United States that is war-torn in the most familiar way. We see flashbacks to her time photographing explosions, military raids, acts of torture, and immolation in the Middle East and Sub-Saharan Africa—images delivered to us in startling cinematic detail by Garland and cinematographer Rob Hardy, whose woozy, not-quite-psychedelic images are heightened by Dunst’s wearied performance. The similarity between these images and those of a Brooklyn suicide bombing land with thunderous unease: the sense that the violence of the developing world and that of the United States is close to one and the same.
Accompanying Lee on her journey to D.C. are her colleagues Joel (Moura), a journalist with adrenaline addiction issues, and Sammy (Henderson), an elder statesman who writes for “what’s left of The New York Times.” The three are also joined by Jessie (Spaeny), a puckish youngster and aspiring war photographer who weasels her way into their group after a run-in with Lee, her hero. Jessie idolizes Lee for her work in journalism, even as she has little idea of the terrors that await her. Lee, on the other hand, is experienced enough to know that Jessie is a casualty waiting to happen. “There is no version of this that isn’t a mistake,” she remarks to Jessie at one point in the film. “I know, because I’m it.”
This is but one of the film’s many moments of hackneyed dialogue, a surprisingly recurrent issue for a film written by the acclaimed screenwriter of such modern sci-fi classics 28 Days Later and Sunshine. Thankfully, however, an unsubtle dialogue moment or two doesn’t hamper the film as much as you might expect, not least because Garland leans more heavily on his talents a director than as a screenwriter for Civil War. You can see this at play in the mentor-mentee relationship between Lee and Jessie, which develops more in its visuals than through the written word. While Lee teaches Jessie the tricks of her trade, Jessie finds herself more and more comfortable in violent warzones while Lee, finally overdosing from her years spent next to carpet bombings, finds herself pulling away from them. Their relationship isn’t especially complex, but Garland communicates it with an expert sense of visual grammar that keeps us fully engaged, while Dunst and Spaeny—an established actor and a rising star, mirroring their onscreen mentor-mentee relationship—keep us primed to the subtleties of their individual characters.
Just as the dilapidated universe of Civil War’s look much like the zombified wasteland of The Last of Us, so too does the film’s narrative bear a striking similarity to that series—and not just because a young girl, her surrogate parent figure, and some dude named Joel journey across an American post-apocalypse. Civil War, like The Last of Us, is a road movie by construction: the film’s protagonists journey across an American countryside defined equally by lawless violence as by its natural beauty. Along the way they stumble across various episodes of violence, each highlighting a different facet of American discontent. They stop off at a gas station run by renegades, where American currency gets you nothing but Canadian dollars buy at a premium. They encounter a firefight between Loyalists and the Western Forces, each group cynically thrilled to be involved in adrenaline-pumping carnage. They come across a standoff between two snipers, neither of whom know which side their opponent is on—save for the fact that the other one is trying to kill them.
This last sequence is the most revealing, and the most indicative of the film’s political intentions. We never learn to which faction either of these snipers belong, because it doesn’t matter—their interest in creating sides matters more than the sides themselves. This is in keeping with Civil War’s refusal to provide concrete worldbuiling details. Yes, we learn about various secessionist factions vying for political control, but their origins are obscured to the point of irrelevance. What states comprise the Florida Alliance? Were the Loyalist states formed by Democrats or Republicans, or some other independent party? In what possible universe could two states as diametrically opposed as Texas and California find themselves flying the same flag? None of these questions are ever explicitly answered, and the film likes it that way: It wants to keep you guessing as to who and what caused this version of America at war with itself, and to instead shift your focus toward the unthinking polarization that could cause such a war in the first place.
This is the clearest instance of Civil War (or at least A24’s marketing team) deliberately subverting expectations. At first glance, Civil War appears tailor-made for partisan controversy: A secessionist movement with a title like “The Western Forces of Texas and California” is the kind of thing you’d be more likely to find on a political conspiracy subreddits than a $50 million blockbuster, and indeed the conjoining of two such diametrically opposed political entities is discomforting to contemporary sensibilities. The notion that the epicenter of coastal liberalism could join in a full-on military alliance with the bastion of religious conservatism is provocative to say the least, and critics have (perhaps expectedly) been divided along politicized lines. Where Matt Zoller Seitz sees this red-blue switcheroo as “politically astute and plausible,” The New Yorker’s Andrew Marantz argues that such a purple coalition “makes no sense,” likening it to “a fictional world that resembled the real world in every respect except that, for some unexplained reason, there was no gravity.”
I am not here to argue the real-world feasibility of either case—political commentator I am not. Still, I can’t help but find it mind-boggling that critics of Marantz’s persuasion would ever argue that Civil War is ideologically incoherent, or that it lacks a political perspective whatsoever. It’s true that politics are not the film’s priority, but Civil War does contain a fundamental political supposition: that a fascist president is enough to bridge the red-blue divide. In this world, Texas and California decide to put aside their differences to fight an authoritarian leader—a man who actively bombs his country’s own civilians whilst proclaiming victory against insurgent rebels.
Whether such a thing would come to pass is well up for debate, but Civil War articulates its vision of antifascist America deliberately and with precision. Offerman’s sinister performance as a strong-man politician is a disturbing vision of American authoritarianism; his presence is the singular cause of Civil War’s violence and decay. We see this reified in the film’s most terrifying sequence, featuring an unnamed Loyalist soldier played by Jesse Plemon. His seven-minute appearance wedges its way into your brain like a recurring nightmare: He unthinkingly deposits civilian corpses into mass grave; he murders two Hongkonger reporters after they confess to not being American; he codifies his racism in an incisive question he asks of the film’s protagonists soon after murdering their friends: “What kind of American are you?”
All of which is to say that Civil War’s politics, while neither the most provocative nor the most sophisticated, are still there. It frames fascism in a morbid light, racism in an alarming one, and in turn argues that forces such as these are a threat to behold, and worth putting aside our differences for. That’s an obvious point to say the least, but Garland maintains an admirable commitment to it. He argues that Americans would, in times of absolute crisis, disregard their partisan ideals to fight against a greater political evil—even if those ideals were split across the Texas-California partisan divide.
This belief is framed so explicitly within the film’s text that I continue to be dumbfounded by critics who routinely accuse the film of failing to have any defined point of view whatsoever. I suppose it can be difficult to see antifascism as an actual political perspective when such a belief is so deeply ingrained into our culture, but to claim that Civil War “has no cause to fight for” is simply bad criticism, ignoring that which is blatantly evident in Civil War’s storytelling: a depiction of trickle-down fascism that begins with authoritarian presidents and ending with racist death squads.
Even still, Civil War is not about civil war. Whatever its dystopian vision of authoritarianism, the point is not to say something morbid about the future of American society. Had Garland wanted to do so, he would have described how and why the WF came about; would have told us to which political party the president belongs, if any; would have recounted the crisis that threw American society into authoritarian decay.
Instead, everything is left ambiguous. When we hear rumors of an event known as “The Antifa Massacre,” we don’t know whether Antifa was doing the massacring or being massacred. When we learn that a third-term president has approved airstrikes against his own civilians, we don’t know who or what could have brought about such demagoguery—nor again what could have caused the insurgency against him. All we know is that this American society has been torn apart by factions and ideologies, that it has been fragmented and siloed into disparate groups with increasingly little in common. And as this fragmentation grows, so too does a violence emerge—a violence lurking at the edges of the American psyche, ready to spring whenever the opportunity presents itself. We would do well to remember that.