Civil War

America is experiencing perhaps its worst political polarization since the 1860s when war broke out between the northern and southern states. In his new movie Civil War, writer/director Alex Garland imagines what life might be like if the country once again moved beyond polarization into violence and bloodshed.

The film opens with America at war. The states of Texas and California have left the union to form the Western Forces, and a group of southern states have also seceded to form the Florida Alliance. They’re at war with the northeastern and midwestern states that stayed loyal to Washington, D.C., and things aren’t going well for what’s left of the United States of America.

Photojournalist Lee (an utterly convincing Kirsten Dunst) and writer Joel (Wagner Moura) are veteran war reporters for Reuters who hope to interview the president of the United States (Nick Offerman) before Washington’s total collapse. Before they leave for their trip from New York to Washington, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), an old-timer looking for one last story, and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a young wannabe photojournalist, convince Lee and Joel to let them tag along.

The distance between New York and D.C. is a little over 200 miles, but the journalists must take a circuitous 800-mile route to find safe passage. Even so, their journey isn’t particularly safe. In this episodic narrative the reporters encounter dangers on the road, document the horrors of war, stay in tent camps with refugees, and run across Americans in denial.

Civil War isn’t for everyone. Some people won’t be interested because the R-rated film overwhelms the senses with realistic war violence, and it contains some bad language. Other people won’t appreciate the fact that the movie poses a lot of questions without offering many answers.

As a filmmaker, Garland rarely caters to audience expectations. Our current political prejudices about red states and blue states don’t map easily onto the movie, and he never explains how America descended into civil war. What circumstances could bring California and Texas into an alliance? Garland doesn’t tell us, and the movie will probably disappoint some viewers because it indicts neither Trumpism nor wokeism.

Civil War isn’t really about politics at all. Rather, it’s more of a meditation on journalistic ethics. It asks why journalists brave the dangers of war, and what toll those dangers take on the psyche. Are these journalists as objective as they think they are? How objective can they be when embedded within a fighting unit that’s keeping them alive? The audience never really finds out who the good guys are in this movie, and sometimes we wonder whether the journalists care about figuring it out.

The film’s political violence is unsettling not only because it’s realistic but also because the movie is set in our homeland. Thanks to real journalists risking their lives, we’ve grown accustomed to watching revolutions and wars from afar. Political violence makes sense to us if it’s happening in Ukraine or the Middle East. Maybe we’re angered or saddened by tyranny and a disregard for human life, but we don’t really think that kind of thing could ever happen here.

Garland challenges this assumption by bringing the war to American soil. Political violence has been part of human history for millennia, but we tend to think America is too enlightened for that kind of behavior. Didn’t our Founding Fathers help normalize political revolution in the West in 1776? Didn’t we almost destroy ourselves less than 100 years later in the Civil War? Despite the blessings of a stable democratic process, Americans are still humans. And in this movie, Garland shows us the horrible things humans do to each other.

Garland’s reluctance to endorse one side in America’s political struggle will infuriate those on both the left and right. But his film isn’t about laying blame or predicting how or why political violence might come to America. He’s just reminding his audience that we have it in us.