Any Other Country
Freed from the relentless churn of Discourse, Alex Garland's 'Civil War' is a far more thoughtful and interesting film
Civil War might just be one of the most talked about movies in the last few years that nobody has seen (at least in online film spaces). Despite making well under half its budget in cinemas, for a moment around its release it felt like everyone was posting about it, if only to dunk.
Much dunking was aimed at its uncanny setting, in which California, Texas, and Florida form an implausible rebel alliance against the rump United States. Plenty more was reserved for writer-director Alex Garland, whose hand-wringing about ‘polarisation’ and extremism on the press junket seemed bizarrely out of touch for someone making a movie about a modern civil war in the contemporary United States. Meanwhile, the marketing suggested politically-charged disaster porn, an Emmerichian thrill-ride laser-targeted to the present moment; the UK trailer even punctuated scenes of monumental carnage with the words “ALL. EMPIRES. FALL”.
The actual film is something quite different.
It’s not that I think the interpretation of Civil War as a liberal-elite tragedy about polarisation is wrong, exactly. It can be found in the text, and even more readily in Garland’s own statements. As far back as 2022, when filming had only just begun, a Telegraph profile of Garland refers to Civil War in passing as “a sci-fi allegory for our currently polarised predicament”. Speaking to the Guardian in 2024, Garland was emphatic about the movie’s themes:
“I came out of [COVID] into a world that was in a state of real agitation. All sorts of fractures were becoming more fractured and paranoid concerns becoming more paranoid.” He wrote two screenplays back-to-back – Civil War first, then Men – and in the process his varied, inchoate anxieties took the shape of one underlying concern: “It’s polarisation. You could see that everywhere. And you could see it getting magnified.”
In the same interview he says the film is concerned with “the speed at which the other side shuts down”; that it is about journalists because he felt “serious journalism” was “under attack” and that he “wanted to make those people ‘heroes’, to put them front and centre”.
So people going into the film looking for that message are not exactly going out on a limb. And yet that reading feels, if not wrong, at least dissonant - to the point that without Garland’s own words staring me in the face that interpretation would never even occur to me. Shorn of the sound and fury of The Discourse, Civil War is not really about the present political moment or the state of polarisation in the USA today. The film, the actual text of the film as it exists on the screen, is not concerned with how this civil war began or the motivations of those fighting it. It’s set in the US the way Romeo & Juliet is set in Verona. To the extent that it is about the United States at all, it is an argument for anti-exceptionalism; that the US is a country like any other, vulnerable to the same misfortunes, not as the judgement of God descending upon the new Jerusalem but as just another conflict in another foreign country.
Civil War’s journalists are not even really heroes in any meaningful sense. They may have noble intentions, sympathetic ideals; they certainly exhibit suicidal physical courage. But that’s not why they’re taking a road trip through a war zone. That’s not why they’re risking life and limb for the sake of black and white pictures. They’re adrenaline junkies. It becomes screamingly obvious throughout the movie that whatever else they may believe, however sincere their fidelity to the truth, what drives them above all is an inescapable, Ballardian addiction to violence.
And why do we want to watch this movie about the violent death of the United States, anyway? The characters are our stand-ins not because they are heroic or relatable or care about democracy, but because they are observers, drawn to the spectacle. We observe vicariously through their vicarious observation. The driving question of the film did not seem, to me, to be “How can we prevent this?” as Kirsten Dunst implies in a moment of despair; or what might lead Americans to turn guns on each other at the site of a mass grave and ask them what kind of Americans they are. These are presented as facts, the way things are in this world, long past changing. Instead what Civil War seems to ask again and again is why are we observing this - and for whom?
Because whatever Garland may have said in some interview, there’s no both-sides ambiguity in the film itself. Not like that, anyway. The Trumpian president, played by Nick Offerman, is explicitly compared to Gaddafi and Ceausescu - and from minute one his days are numbered. The war is already over when Civil War opens. The Western Forces, who look like the US military and seem to have most of its hardware, are hours away from rolling over the capitol; President Offerman is defended only by a loyal core of Brooks Bros. rioters in bulletproof vests. The journos aren’t exactly the WF’s biggest fans, but if they’re on any side it’s that one. Some colleagues they bump into late in the movie are even embedded with the Cali-Texans brigades. Our journalist ‘heroes’ are trying to get through the battle lines to DC so they can interview the president in his fuhrerbunker before the Western Forces put him against the wall. In other words, there is nothing they can change in this scenario. Their record is only - can only be - for posterity.
It’s certainly not for their fellow Americans in the movie’s here-and-now. None of the main characters really seem like they know why they’re making this suicide charge into the heart of darkness. There’s little chance they’ll even make it to the president, still less he’ll sit down with them for an interview. Both Kirsten Dunst’s grizzled veteran photographer and Cailee Spaeny's naive young cub say their parents are sitting on a farm somewhere in Middle America, trying to pretend none of this is happening. When Wagner Moura’s character talks to a young sales assistant in a fortified town (the only civilian we meet outside of a warzone), he seems genuinely shaken to learn that she deliberately ignores the news. Civil War is not a movie where American journalists bring the fiery Truth to the good old American people and start the wheels of justice grinding slow. No one is watching. No one wants to know. The American people just want all of this to go away.
And when our nominal heroes finally reach the White House against all odds, minus several members of their team and surrounded by a Western Forces hit squad storming the Oval Office… there’s nothing there. Moura’s character, Joel, gets his quote from the president: “Don’t let them kill me”. Then they kill him. Joel is an observer, nothing more. As our characters follow the violence, whenever a picture is taken it flashes up on the screen, held for a moment in black and white, as if already committed to the annals of a high school textbook. Will anyone care tomorrow, or next year, or a hundred years when all this is history? When the journalists are killed in action, their deaths or their bloodied corpses are shot by their colleagues, like everyone else’s. It feels like a last rite. It feels like cannibalism. In observing, in following violence like a wing of vultures, the journalist characters must kill the feeling part of themselves: the fear of death, the sorrow for the fallen, the human need to act. Is it worth killing that part of yourself to make this record for posterity, though it may never matter to anyone else?
Civil War works best as an anti-exceptionalist movie: against the journalist as an exceptional figure and the United States as an exceptional country. Even the most self-critical American media tends to be suffused with exceptionalism; if it’s not the greatest nation on Earth it’s the Great Satan. But in Civil War, the USA is just another country, the great American journalist just another casualty of war. The same archetypal figures from a hundred Western news reports pose for their photos, this time in Hawaiian shirts. Far from the sacreligious thrill of monumental obliteration you might see in Independence Day, Civil War is filmed consciously to evoke urban combat in Iraq or the Balkans. Scenes of bombed-out buildings have more in common with tanks rolling through Red Square than tripods slicing up New York. It could be any other conflict in any other country - as seen on TV.