‘Civil War’ Movie: ‘Terrifying Premonition’ or ‘Grandly Tasteless’?
Summary from the AllSides News Team
As America enters a particularly polarized 2024 election cycle, Alex Garland’s “Civil War” movie depicts a near-future U.S. mired in internal conflict. Is it a serious prediction of a dark future, or a shallow story without a real argument?
The Details: A synopsis from IMDb says the film, which released Friday, portrays “A journey across a dystopian future America, following a team of military-embedded journalists as they race against time to reach DC before rebel factions descend upon the White House.”
For Context: Recent years have seen many, particularly on the political right, predicting a civil war over America’s current partisan divide. In 2021, polling by The Economist (Lean Left bias) and YouGov (Center bias) found that 43% of Americans believed a civil war was at least somewhat likely in the next decade.
How the Media Covered It: While some reviews from news outlets took the movie seriously, others were not impressed. The Daily Caller (Right bias) said events in the movie’s trailer “could definitely happen in real life,” but a Financial Times (Center bias) review called the film a “grandly tasteless disaster movie.” Many reviews focused on the movie’s ideological vagueness. While New York Times (Opinion rated Left) columnist Michelle Goldberg said its ideological ambiguity “seems like a source of its power,” National Review’s (Opinion rated Right) Armond White called the “violent fantasy” both “offensive” and “too flimsy to be a cautionary tale.” The Verge (Lean Left bias) agreed, saying the story “doesn’t have the guts to articulate a cohesive, thoughtful point.”
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Civil War is the stuff of nightmares in the new film of the same name. American carnage has come to pass in Manhattan, Pittsburgh and beyond. It also looks naggingly sexy. In a slick slab of provocation from writer-director Alex Garland, with Kirsten Dunst as a veteran war photographer, social collapse makes for a pumping blockbuster. Technically, the movie is a wowzer: Apocalypse Now gone TikTok. As always with backers A24, the marketing is beautiful.
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That old political reprimand “Have you no decency?” has lost its force. Politicians and media folk show no compunction about lying and tyrannizing, which is how we get Alex Garland’s shameless new movie Civil War. You can’t trust Garland, one of the least of the demi-Kubricks. His topical subjects are less outré than Yorgos Lanthimos’s; plus, he’s less of a craftsman than David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, or Jonathan Glazer. Yet, in Civil War, Garland tries for visionary virtuosity, faking rawness and sensationalism, all to predict America’s collapse. Designed to be fun, it is,...
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