Here's The Film About What An American Civil War Could Look Like (+ The Bombed Out Cities)

What Kind Of American Are You?

The new film, Civil War, is playing in Burbank today. It premiered at South by Southwest in March. The trailer is pretty horrific and I hope I can see the whole film on Netflix or something. It’s a mixed up situation— with an authoritarian third term president beset by 3 secessionist groups— one made up of rebels from California and Texas who eventually capture DC and drag the president out from under the Resolute Desk begging not to be killed.

Vulture’s Bilge Ebiri wrote “Even the film’s episodic quality— it’s really just a ghastly travelogue through the war-torn Eastern Seaboard, with our protagonists confronted at each stop with some upsetting new incident— feels like a provocation. Part of shutting yourself off to such horrors involves being able to move past them, and Civil War, like its characters, glides past each monstrous vignette with unbothered brio. This can make the film feel weirdly weightless at times. Its characters are observers and nomads. If anything, they feel less invested in what they’re witnessing as the movie goes on.”

Civil War’s lack of a political point of view, as well as its refusal to really identify the positions of its warring parties, has come in for some understandable criticism. But does any sane person really want a version of this film that attempts to spell out these people’s politics or, even worse, takes sides in its fictional conflict? (That sounds like it would be the worst movie ever made.) Garland does include flashes of real news footage from a variety of recent American disturbances, but he’s clearly done more research into media depictions of other countries’ war zones.

This is maybe his best idea, and why the film’s lack of political context feels more pointed than spineless: The conceit here is to depict Americans acting the way we’ve seen people act in other international conflicts, be it Vietnam or Lebanon or the former Yugoslavia or Iraq or Gaza or … well, the list goes on. In that sense, Civil War winds up becoming a movie about itself. Beyond the plausibility of war in the United States or the tragedy of such an eventuality, it’s about the way we refuse to let images from wars like this get to us. It’s more a call for reflection, an attempt to put us in the shoes of others, than a warning— not an It Can Happen Here movie, but a Here’s What It’s Like movie. It doesn’t want to make us feel so much as it wants us to ask why we don’t feel anything.

MAGAt Kari Lake campaigning (not part of the film)

Jamie Raskin (D-MD), this morning: “Every day, Trump’s MAGA Republicans put the values, habits and practices of democracy in danger, and they cannot be trusted to respect the Constitution or the rule of law. That’s why I have one overriding political imperative: To win back the House from the MAGA extremists, to expand our narrow majority in the Senate, and to defend the White House. 2024 is not a year for anyone to sit at home and passively watch the polls. We need to be in the business of mobilization, not prognostication. Let’s leave it all on the field and defend democracy and freedom with everything we’ve got.”