American Wasteland: Alex Garland’s Civil War

WARNING: SPOILERS AHEAD

In the midst of what is in all probability the most consequential presidential election in the history of the United States of America, writer/director Alex Garland drops his nightmarish depiction of American dysfunction, the bluntly titled film Civil War (2024). Set in near-future America, the film follows four journalists as they cover a contemporary civil war in the United States, in which the so-called Western Forces (Texas and California) have united to depose the corrupt three-term president (Nick Offerman, whose character is never named). 

Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), a veteran war photographer patterned after Lee Miller, the World War II war correspondent, along with her colleagues Joel (Wagner Moura) and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), are stuck in a war-torn hotel in New York City as the battle for the nation’s soul rages outside. Lee and Joel figure there’s only one story left, as the country collapses: drive to Washington, DC amid all the chaos and destruction and interview the president, if they can get there before the Western Forces attack. Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a wannabe war photographer who idolizes Lee, tags along, much to Lee’s initial displeasure. 

The journey to the capital takes up the bulk of the film, as the foursome travel through what’s left of the United States: freeways littered with abandoned cars, leftover Christmas displays blasting music in the middle of nowhere, sports stadiums full of refugees, downed helicopters, mass graves, and abandoned shopping malls. Those who come to this film looking for a conventional action film will be sorely disappointed. Instead, Garland highlights the people who have been damaged by the war, the collapse of society, and the toll the conflict has taken on the country as whole. 

The idea of Texas and California joining forces appealed to Garland “to avoid a quick lazy read”¹ by his audience – something that many of the film’s viewers apparently wanted. With the current political situation in the United States being absolutely polarized (as I write this, we are just a few months away from the presidential election, and most polls show a nearly even 50/50 split between the two dominant parties), no doubt left-leaning viewers would wish to see the right excoriated whereas right-leaning viewers would hope for the reverse. But Garland doesn’t allow either option. As he told Christopher Kuo in an interview in The New York Times, 

I’m provoking the question, why are they together? Is it because I’m British and I’m so stupid I don’t realize they’re in two politically different spaces? I do realize their differences. But what would be so important as a threat that the polarized politics between Texas and California was suddenly seen as less important than the threat?²

That threat is the rogue president, who is rehearsing a televised speech on the conflict at the beginning of the film. Although the conflict is clearly trending against him, he declares the opposite, claiming that “we are now closer than we’ve ever been to victory. Some are already calling it the greatest victory in the history of mankind.” Nothing could be further from the truth. The Western Forces are just a few states away, intent on blowing up the newly erected retaining wall outside the White House and killing the president, motivated in large part because of his actions that eliminated the FBI and called upon the military to fire on civilians, while appointing himself (it is implied) as a three-term president, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary. The president’s political party is never mentioned, nor is there any mention of either Republicans or Democrats in the film. These alliances have been formed, as unlikely as they may be, to combat tyranny. But what will be left of a country in ruins?

Nick Offerman as The President in Civil War

In many ways, Civil War reminds me of John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939), with the passengers in the coach moving from one scene of destruction to the next, looking for some safe place to rest, or Richard C. Sarafian’s Vanishing Point (1971), in which coast-to-coast car delivery driver Kowalski (Barry Newman) jets though the western United States on a speed-fuelled run that ends with his death in a car crash. In all three films, the fatalistic vision is clear: we are embarked on a Sisyphean journey for which there is no end, which will ceaselessly repeat as politics not only in America, but in the world, move further and further into the age of rant. Facts don’t matter anymore, and power is wielded with a whip hand. Yet one could argue that the overall message of Civil War, as unsettling as it is, might be qualified as bottom-level optimism; in the end, the tyrant is overthrown. But the quest for power through violence only begets more of the same; the liberator today may well be the dictator of tomorrow. Yet what choice does one have in a society in which your voice has been ignored, if not obliterated? 

For Garland, the press is the only real hope for the preservation of democracy in a world of online duplicity and casual slander. There is also a vagueness in the film’s narrative that is entirely intentional, because Garland is deliberately withholding essential information from the viewers, asking them to provide the missing data through their own interpretation of events. And in this act, the press should aid them. Although the United States in the film is seen as collapsing almost entirely, it seems that there is something in the mix worth saving. Without onsite information as to the actual events, one might never know the true story of what happened – the real through narrative. This is what the press provides. As Garland told Kuo,

Something terrible, it seems to me, has been happening to the press. I wanted to put the press as the heroes [. . .] If it’s a film about checks and balances, one of the biggest checks and balances you have on government is the press. But the press needs to be trusted for that to work. They’ve been undermined and demonized partly by external forces and internal forces [. . .] When I say external forces and internal forces undermining journalism, an external force might be the context of social media, all these other voices and the power these voices have. You could also have an external force in the form of an influential politician undermining media.³ 

The press as seen in Civil War is deliberately anachronistic. Although Lee uses a modern digital camera throughout the film, Jessie uses a 35mm camera for her war reportage and is even shown developing strips of film negative in the field. Lee, Joel, Sammy, and Jessie are old-fashioned “beat” reporters, working on the ground to get the story firsthand, no matter what the danger. They follow the progress of the war relentlessly and compete with their other colleagues to be first to the battlefront. If any new society emerges out of the ashes of Civil War, Garland argues, it will be because an accurate witness to history was right there – not reaching out through electronic media from a distance or from drones in the sky, but by following the warring combatants mile by mile and later block by block, directly in the heat of combat, getting close-up pictures of the conflict from a distance of a few feet. 

When Lee Miller followed the Allied Forces in World War II into Berlin, she saw the horrors of the Holocaust in person and documented it forever in her photos; she was one of the first reporters in Dachau after the camp was liberated. She saw war, violence, death, and destruction and was changed forever by the experience. This kind of reportage – a personal quest for the truth – is increasingly rare these days. Like Lee Miller, Lee Smith gets the story by being first on the scene, her camera at the ready. As Garland told Kuo, 

The film [presents] old-fashioned reporters, as opposed to extremely biased journalists who are essentially producing propaganda. They’re old-fashioned reporters, and the film tries itself to function like those reporters. One of the journalists is very young, but they’re using a 35-millimeter camera, which is the means of photojournalism from an era where the societal function of media was more fully understood and embraced.⁴

But as Lee repeatedly states to Jessie as one of the maxims of the business, they’re present only to witness and record events, not to intervene. Early in the group’s road trip to the nation’s capital, the reporters stop to get gas at a rundown station. The three men guarding the pump all have high-calibre semiautomatic weapons, and Lee winds up paying $300 Canadian – American money is now almost worthless – for half a tank of gas and two jerry cans. 

Wandering off, Jessie finds two men strung up by their arms in a barn, battered and bloodied by torture. Lee follows her, camera in hand. The man responsible for the men’s plight is all too happy to claim credit for his actions and proudly poses for a photo with his victims at Lee’s request. “I knew that one in high school,” he adds, pointing to one of the men. Jessie is too shocked to say or do anything, but later reprimands herself for it. “I didn’t even take a picture,” she repeats over and over. For Lee, it’s just another day in the field.

Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and her protégé Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) under fire in Civil War

Yet it’s not the battlefield that dominates the film, but rather images of those displaced in the war as well as those who seem to be avoiding the conflict altogether. At one point, the group drives through a small town that seems untouched by all the violence, with picture perfect houses on small town streets, quaint shops, and people walking along as if nothing is amiss. Joel, Jessie, and Lee enter a boutique clothing shop, where a bored young woman, seemingly oblivious to the war, is idly reading a book behind the counter. Joel approaches her and asks, “hey, are you aware there’s a pretty huge civil war going on all across America?” Looking up from the book with an air of complete indifference, the young woman replies, “oh, sure, but we just try to stay out of it. With what we see on the news, seems like it’s for the best.” Joel is astonished, but these small pockets of normalcy continue to pop up throughout the film. While most of America burns, there are still some places where life seems almost normal. 

The flip side of this, of course, is offered by a scene in which two snipers, pinned down in an abandoned Christmas-themed drive-through by another sniper, wait for the right moment to kill one another. (The drive-through, incidentally, was an actual Christmas theme park that went bankrupt from lack of business and required minimal re-propping for the shoot.) As Joel approaches, asking, “what’s going on?” one of the snipers laconically responds that “someone is in that house – they’re stuck, we’re stuck – no one’s giving us orders, man. Someone is trying to kill us. We are trying to kill them.” Any ideological reasons for the conflict have vanished. The snipers have “no idea” who is in the house; it’s kill or be killed. 

Later in the film, Jesse Plemons appears as an unnamed militia member who, with his friends, has been rounding up and slaughtering “non-Americans” and dumping their bodies into a mass grave. When Joel tries to intercede in the carnage, telling Plemons’ unnamed character “hey, we’re Americans,” Plemons responds, brandishing his assault rifle, “OK – what kind of American are you?” This scene sums up the thesis of the entire film: unless you conform to a rigid stereotype of what it is to be an “American,” if someone has a gun, you’re eliminated.

The reporters are a diverse group. Sammy is old, overweight, and tired, but also a hardened veteran when it comes to surviving at the front. Joel is brash, always asking questions, good at getting quotes from the people they encounter on their way, but continually astonished by the meaninglessness of the conflict as the violence escalates. Lee is an expert professional, offering tips to Jessie as their relationship evolves, but she’s also close to being burned out. We find out that, in her early years, she was the youngest photographer selected to work for Magnum, the famous photojournalism agency. But now, she’s beginning to wonder what her end game is. Jessie, of course, is the young neophyte who represents the future of battleground journalism; by the end of the film, she’s become an accomplished war photographer.

It’s interesting to note the power dynamics within the group and whom the film’s narrative highlights the most. Lee and Jessie drive the film forward with their relentless search for new images of the war, while Joel and Sammy snag interviews from the soldiers and civilians. As they push forward through the countryside, Lee and Jessie do the real groundwork, constantly taking pictures of everything they see. In one sequence early on, Lee finds a downed helicopter in a parking lot and demonstrates to Jessie the most effective way to frame the image with her camera. 

Civil War

Jessie pokes around from various angles and finally nails a particularly good view of the scene, while Lee comments admiringly on her use of 35mm film over digital. Later, when reviewing her images with Lee, Jessie laments that so many of the shots are useless. “Keep looking,” Lee tells her. “I figure the strike rate for keepers is 30 to 1.” Lee is clearly impressed with Jessie’s tenacity in the field, and the two women form a genuine bond based on shared admiration and dedication to their profession. It is the women who see the war, who capture it in their images, while Joel and Sammy run interference with those who would stand in their way. Their affection for each other is obvious and forms the central core of the film’s emotional centre. As the film unfolds, Garland makes us see the war through their eyes, sometimes using intercut freeze frames to show us the images they capture: Lee’s are in digital colour, while Jessie’s are in 35mm black and white. The two women are our guides in this conflict. What they see, we will see. 

It’s a difficult assignment for all of them. This trip is “in country,” covering one’s own nation as if it’s a war zone in a foreign land. Even in ruins, America seems to still have a strange beauty, something that’s ineradicable despite the exigencies of war. Much of Civil War was shot in the Georgia countryside, giving the film a natural, even bucolic appearance. One day seems to flow into the next. Nature is a dominant figure in the film, contrasting the beauty of trees, meadows, and fields with the wreckage of battle strewn through it. 

To shoot the road footage, Garland rigged up a large four-door camera truck to serve as the press van the group used, where much of the film’s action takes place. The image we get for much of the film is an authentic vision of real life, without the use of CGI. And a lot of the film is just waiting – waiting for something to happen, waiting for night to turn into day so the journey can continue. We become part of the group, part of their quest, and share their incredulity at the insanity of it all. At the same time, an atmosphere of continual dread hangs over the film. Will they make it to their destination at all? Or will they become casualties of the conflict?

Civil War really doesn’t have a conventional narrative. One could also compare it to Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) and that film’s open-ended quest for experience by two men on motorcycles as they roam across the United States, although the landscape now is very different. But the search for meaning remains. As the tag line for Easy Rider puts it, “A man went looking for America. He couldn’t find it anywhere.” In Easy Rider, the protagonists search for meaning and find nothing – even as the film ends in their violent death, killed by two rednecks with shotguns just because they don’t like the way they look. 

In Civil War the journalists have given up any search for meaning; they’re just there to take pictures. Nothing makes sense, but it’s happening anyway. If you’re a bystander, watching the conflict go by, you can be detached. You’re not directly affected by the brutality all around you; instead, you have a front row seat in the centre of the action, so long as you “stay the fuck out of our way” as the Western Forces repeatedly warn Joel and Jesse.

Perhaps this is precisely why the film performed indifferently at the box office. On a $50 million budget, the film grossed just $114.5 million, which – when you factor in the cost of prints and advertising – is a rather small return, not the $500 or $600 million outcome one might see for more conventional war films. Yet Civil War is the biggest bet yet by A24, the maverick film production/distribution company based in Manhattan, rather than Los Angeles. A24 is sort of like American-International Pictures was in the late 1950s through the late 1960s: an outlaw outfit making films with a decided edge – the kinds of films the majors won’t produce, either because they’re so far out of the loop that they can only think conventionally, or because they want to avoid any financial risk. It’s far safer to crank out yet another Star Wars sequel, prequel, or spinoff. But A24 doesn’t want to do that; they prefer risk, as this film aptly demonstrates.  

A24’s first major hit was Harmony Korine’s remarkable Spring Breakers (2012), a sort of warped beach party film for the 21st century. Other equally original films soon followed, such as Alex Garland’s sci-fi parable Ex Machina (2015), Ari Aster’s Hereditary (2018), Josh and Bennie Safdie’s Uncut Gems (2019), and the studio’s biggest triumph to date, Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert’s Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022), which was nominated for 11 Academy Awards and won seven, including Best Picture. The industry was astonished. There are numerous other examples that one could cite, but they all prove one thing: A24 is an outlier, pushing in new directions where the major studios are afraid to follow.

Jesse Plemons as a vigilante in Civil War

Masters at marketing, A24 cut the trailer for Civil War to look like a mainstream action film, selecting clips to suggest that the film was something along the lines of Roland Emmerich’s Independence Day (1996), Jonathan Liebesman’s Battle: Los Angeles (2011), or Stefano Sollima’s Sicario: Day of the Soldado (2018), emphasizing action and violence. There was no mention of the abstract political landscape the film depicted, and many viewers on both sides of the political spectrum were disappointed by the film’s refusal to do this. Some went to theatres expecting to see a non-stop series of spectacular battles, devoid of anything other than spectacle. What they got was something quite different, and the reviews for the film were decidedly mixed. 

Owen Gleiberman, for example, writing in Variety, described Civil War as a “meandering” war film, finding it “too abstract,” claiming that because of Garland’s alternative reality setup, “we don’t know how to read [the film] at all” [original emphasis]. He continues, “perhaps we could believe in a world where Texas and California are insurrectionary teammates. But if that’s the case, at least tell us why. Fill in the fiction,” which is precisely what Garland does not want to do. Later in the same review, he argues that “the war photographers keep getting in the way of what you want to see . . . Kirsten Dunst and her crew mostly stand between the audience and the combatants, when what we really want is a more dynamic connection to what’s going on inside the combatants” [original emphasis].⁵ No, we don’t. We want to stay with the photographers and document their reactions to the conflict. 

Gleiberman further argued that “the film starves us for details of our national schism . . . because there’s rarely a sense that the war we’re seeing is being fought by ordinary citizens. We aren’t allowed to connect to their rage, their ideas, what brought them to the point of social breakdown.” No, we’re connecting with the people who are documenting the war. Finally, Gleiberman rhetorically asks, “what would a scary version of Civil War look like? It would be a movie in which the characters who are fighting each other are interesting.” This is precisely what the movie is not about. The people covering the war are the centre of the film, along with their personal stories, struggles, and triumphs. To suggest, as Gleiberman does, that “the war photographers keep getting in the way of what you want to see”⁶ is a deliberate misreading of the film’s intent. Despite its title, Civil War is not interested in the conflict as much as it’s interested in those who document it. 

Many viewers felt cheated or deliberately misled by the film’s title and/or trailer, and it’s clear that the trailer for Civil War gives the viewer a somewhat deceptive read on the film’s content. But that’s what trailers are supposed to do: give the viewer a taste of what they might see if they see the film in a theatre. I was pleased to be blindsided by the film’s ambiguous approach to the material at hand. Civil War asks the viewers to fill in the blanks and do some thinking for themselves, which is rare indeed. It’s been that way for a long time. When John Carpenter made his brilliant version of The Thing in 1982, the film’s unresolved ending enraged viewers, and the film was a failure in its initial release. Today, it’s generally acknowledged to be a classic. 

Reviews by actual theatregoers, culled from social media, were polarized – reflecting the current political landscape – and audience members either embraced Civil War or actively hated it, as one might expect. One viewer wrote “it’s trash. It promotes hate speech, discrimination, and violence.” Another argued that “there’s no exposition, all you know is that a civil war has broken out in America, and the film’s principals, news photojournalists, have to travel from New York to Washington, by way of West Virginia, to interview the president.” A third added, “The few intense scenes don’t make up for that fact of overall how slow and off base this movie is. No matter your political affiliation, I guarantee you’ll agree if you put yourself through this movie.” Other negative comments included “boring,” “not an action film,” and “a total waste of time.”

On the other hand, a more positive viewer commented that “the best part of this movie is why people hate it [. . .] If you require a film that meticulously guides you through a clear ‘how did we get here’ narrative, this might not be the one for you [. . .] The film immerses you in the chaos, violence, heartbreak, and confusion [of war], leaving you feeling as bewildered as the characters.” Another commented, “It doesn’t try to be overtly political, which is probably why some dislike the movie. It’s more about the ugliness, absurdity and surreal nature of civil war. If you’re looking for some right-wing or left-wing fantasy conflict, this probably won’t suit you.” A third viewer felt that “it’s a mistake to dismiss this movie as a political hatchet job. It’s a very plausible story about combat photographers and journalists on the front line of a conflict that in this instance is in America. The point is the difficult and dangerous act of bearing witness, of recording a sad, surreal, and bloody civil war.” 

This is precisely why Civil War is so important and why only A24 would have green lit such a contentious film. The major studios are obviously going to stay away from such a topic or, if they tackled it, they’d add much more conventional character storylines, over-the-top special effects, and a battalion of major stars to guarantee the commercial success of the production. When Everything Everywhere All at Once became a massive commercial and critical hit, mainstream cinema purveyors were taken entirely by surprise. Who thought up this film, and why did anyone bankroll it? In an era of technically perfect but intellectually empty multiplex films designed to appeal to all four “quadrants” – male and female, both above and below age 25 – Civil War is almost wilfully designed to appeal to art house viewers, accustomed to more thoughtful filmmaking. 

But A24’s release strategy paid off in splitting its audience right down the middle ideologically. As Pamela McClintock noted in The Hollywood Reporter, 

Civil War played exactly down the middle as both sides put aside their differences and sat together in cinemas across the country to see for themselves what all the buzz was about. Precisely 50 percent of ticket buyers identified as conservative and the other 50 percent as liberal, according to final exit polling data from the weekend [. . .] In keeping with [A24’s] penchant for using film to spark conversation, it never intended to make a movie that glorified one political party or another.⁷

Or as Richard Newby so aptly put it in his essay on the film,

Civil War is an abrasive and uncomfortable film, not because it fully subscribes to any particular ideology, but because it doesn’t — and we hate not having clearly defined sides to root for or against or media that doesn’t perfectly align with our worldview so we can walk out of the theatre confidently knowing we’re a good person.⁸ 

The first two-thirds of the film are almost leisurely, as if we’re getting a panoramic view of America in ruins on a hellish road trip. We get to know the main characters well – their hopes, their fears, their ambitions, and their histories. Alternately bored by the tedium of the journey and terrified when they confront the threat of direct violence, the journalists also engage in some seriously risky recreational activities, such as transferring from one car to another at 60 miles per hour when some friendly rival journalists pull up beside them on the highway. There’s no reason for it; it’s just an adrenalin rush. It’s a diversion from the carnage that surrounds them. 

As the film moves to its conclusion in the last half hour, the road trip aspect comes to an end. Sammy is killed when he intervenes to help his colleagues, and only Jessie, Joel, and Lee make the final push to the capital. After reaching the Western Forces HQ in Charlottesville, Virginia, Joel discovers that the United States government has completely collapsed; the United States military, or what’s left of it, has surrendered to the Western Forces. From two rival reporters, he learns that just “a few do-or-die soldiers, a handful of Secret Service, still protect the White House. The WF’s gonna roll right in.” This is the last leg of the journey. Joel, Jessie, and Lee embed with the Western Forces, travelling with them to Washington, DC.

Violence is still all around them, but now they’ve become part of it, more than ever before, as the Western Forces close in on the White House. Those looking for violent spectacle will find it here (the special effects and green screen work were done, for the most part, in London), as Washington, DC becomes a surreal landscape of rapacious destruction. Lee is clearly traumatized, unable to function, but Jessie dodges between tanks and helicopters, taking one photo after another. Much of this sequence is staged without sound; there’s a gentle acoustic guitar solo that provides a mournful accompaniment to the images of death and destruction. 

The Lincoln Memorial is destroyed by mortar fire. When natural sound returns, there is only gunfire, as the camera sweeps across the desolate wreck of the capital. Western Forces helicopters deploy rapid-fire aerial machine guns to strafe down the opposing soldiers, blasting through the streets with laser-like efficiency. As the battle unfolds, Garland cuts repeatedly to tight shots of Lee, staring at the scene in shock, clearly traumatized by the carnage. The president tries to escape in his armour-plated limousine but is turned back by gunfire. The Western Forces open fire on two decoy limousines that have been sent out to throw the soldiers off the scent, killing all the passengers inside. In the confusion, Jessie, Joel, and Lee somehow manage to beat the soldiers to the White House, which is eerily deserted. 

Assault on the Lincoln Memorial in Civil War

Inside, the three wander through the mezzanine, which is littered with dead bodies. They walk through the pressroom, filled with abandoned equipment. The soldiers soon catch up with them and swiftly pass by, moving into the Briefing Room. A Secret Service agent cries out “I’m unarmed. I’m here to talk” and attempts to negotiate the surrender and safe passage of the president to a neutral territory. But the time for negotiation is over, and the Western Forces’ soldiers kill her with a single shot, pushing down the darkened hallway to the Oval Office. Lee comes to her senses again, furiously documenting the assault with a barrage of photos. 

Garland picks up the pace of freeze frames intercut with live action, punctuating the film with an ever-increasing series of ominous, silent images. But then, as the soldiers approach the Oval Office during the final assault, Jessie steps into the centre of the hallway to get a better shot, which is right in the line of fire. Instinctively, Lee rushes out to push her to the ground, but is fatally wounded by gunfire. Lying on the ground, staring up at her with stupefaction, Jessie photographs Lee’s final moments of life – and the moment of her death – as her body falls to the floor. 

In a state of shock, Jessie moves past Lee’s lifeless shell and follows Joel to the Oval Office. The soldiers pry the president’s hands from his desk as he pleads for mercy, despite having had none for the people he was supposed to represent. Joel, sensing that this may be the president’s last few seconds, moves in front of the soldiers and commands them to stop. “Wait! Wait! I need a quote,” he shouts, as the president cowers on the floor. “Don’t let – don’t let them kill me,” the president stammers. 

Garland cuts to a tight close-up of Joel looking down at the president on the floor. He pauses for a moment and then says quietly, “Yeah. That’ll do.” As Jessie snaps some final photos, the president is summarily executed. This scene fades to white, to be gradually replaced by Jessie’s final photo of the scene: the five soldiers who killed the president grouped around his body in triumph, grinning from ear to ear. It’s an unsettling finale, to say the least. 

What, in the end, is Civil War saying? That’s up to the viewer to decide. It’s astonishing that such a film could be made in today’s hyper-partisan climate. In the United States right now, we are more divided than at any time since the Civil War. Even during the Vietnam era, although the left and right were far apart, some sense of civility remained. Now, as with the real Civil War, the political atmosphere has turned neighbour against neighbour, friend against friend, in an atmosphere of poisonous gossip that has overwhelmed the Internet. Social media? No, it’s more properly called anti-social media, because it has weaponised anonymous commenters and allowed unfounded rumours and slanders to circulate. The onset of AI has made this even worse; spurious images and texts can now be constructed within seconds and instantly spread around the world. How will we cope with this now, much less in the future?

On November 19, 1863, Abraham Lincoln delivered his now-famous Gettysburg Address on a battlefield while the Civil War was in progress, wondering aloud whether the nation would survive the conflict. As he said then, in part, “our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure.” It was true then, and it’s true now. The political schisms outlined in Civil War may be fictional, but the threat of violence is real. Whatever happens in the next decade or so in America is unknown to all of us, but in this film, Garland has shown us what the cost may be – and made no suggestion as to what comes next.

Endnotes