<em>Civil War</em> Was Made in Anger

When the first trailer for Alex Garland’s new movie, Civil War—a harrowing depiction of conflict between American states in the near future—was revealed, a wave of bafflement spread across the internet. Incredulous articles questioned the conditions that would lead Texas and California to become allies against “loyalist states,” as was written on a promotional map. Others wondered how the film could dare to depict such conflict without really explaining its origins, given that Civil War takes place well into its titular war, with rebel forces descending on the White House to evict a president (played by Nick Offerman) who has refused to leave office.

This reaction only justified Garland’s reasons for making Civil War—not merely as a gnarly war drama, he told me in a recent interview, but as an argument against political polarization: “I find it interesting that people would say, ‘These two states could never be together under any circumstances.’ Under any circumstances? Any? Are you sure?” The movie imagines a worst-case scenario in which American society unravels beyond comprehension, and centers the frontline journalists trying to make sense of the ensuing chaos. That potential viewers can’t understand why Texas and California might need to ally against a tyrant, he said, is a sign of how bad things have gotten in this alternative timeline.

Although the larger history within Civil War is oblique, Garland’s script lays out just enough to explain why tanks might be rolling across the country from California to Washington, D.C. Some of the facts are clear: Offerman’s character is a three-term president who has begun staging attacks on his own citizens. He’s also disbanded the FBI, and become what Garland calls “essentially Constitution-smashing and fascistic”; suddenly, “states that might not necessarily … be allied are allied against a threat that they consider greater than their partisan differences.”

The previous time I spoke with Garland was about his film Men, a disorienting piece of countryside horror that truly kept its audience at arm’s length. Back then, he seemed confident about the open-endedness of his storytelling, accepting that some viewers might not embrace the intended ambiguity. With Civil War, he’s both energized and exhausted by the movie’s prerelease discourse. The strange alliances that have formed are part of the challenge of the film, he told me—a dare for viewers to imagine a future where such action might be required. “Are you saying extremist politics would always remain more important than a president of this sort? That sounds crazy to me,” he said. (It’s worth noting that some visible supporters of Donald Trump have argued he should be allowed to serve more than two terms.)

Garland has been in a hurry to make Civil War, completing its script in 2020 just as COVID lockdowns took hold. Though the film is rooted in his worries over our current political environment, his eagerness to pursue the project stemmed more from a concern that his passion might fade the longer he waited. “It’s a film that comes out of anger,” he said. “Anger gives you urgency.” That anger is about the great loss of objectivity he perceives in modern politics. “I feel like one of the bits of fabric that’s unraveling around us … is the way journalists are attacked and not trusted … We’re seeing the consequences of that happening like little wildfires all around us.”

[Read: The men who started the war]

The protagonist of Civil War is Lee (Kirsten Dunst), a seasoned war photographer named for the pioneering World War II journalist Lee Miller. Accompanied by two reporters and a cub photographer, Lee’s goal is to push behind enemy lines to reach the White House before invading forces do, hoping to capture the moment of the president’s surrender—or defeat. On the way, her group comes across various tableaus of chaos, social disorder, and bone-rattling combat, observing and documenting—but not intervening, despite the crisis that’s unfolding. Garland, who is 53 years old and was raised in London, said this dispassionate perspective was inspired by the “old-fashioned journalism” he grew up on, where reporters “deliberately removed bias”: “I wanted the film to function like that, and to put journalists at the heart of that narrative.”

To Garland, his characters’ neutral mission should be celebrated, but the trade-offs to their approach can be unsettling to think about. “I wanted to make them heroes,” he said. “They could be complex; they could be conflicted; they could be damaged; they could be uncertain; they could be compromised, actually. But they’re still doing something utterly necessary, with integrity.” The finale sees Lee and company thrust directly into scenes of combat, and although it’s engrossing—especially on IMAX screens—it’s lacking in thrilling do-goodery, partly because the journalists resolutely attempt to stay uninvolved. “Aversion, that’s what you should feel,” Garland said of the choices made by Lee in the film’s visceral closing act, where she must move through a full-scale invasion to try to capture the fall of the White House. “It’s too terrible … It needs to be repellent.”

Garland said he’s uninterested in force-feeding any particular ideology—he wants people leaving the theater without their mind made up about the way Civil War’s denouement unfolds. “My daughter, who’s 17, [is] studying film, and the teacher said in one of her classes, ‘It’s unethical for filmmakers to present something without making it clear on which position they stand with regards to [an] issue’ … To me, to make that statement is unethical.” Garland is most resolute on this topic regarding the president in Civil War, whom the audience mostly glimpses in TV broadcasts. When I suggested that some viewers might see a hint of Donald Trump in Offerman’s performance, Garland shrugged. “Nowhere in this narrative does it let you know what political side this president began on,” he said. “He may be a fascist at the point we meet him, but he presumably in his first term didn’t say [that] … The film puts that in the viewers’ hands. Nick is interesting in the way that he refuses to let you read him … It is what the viewer is bringing to it.”

Still, Garland made plenty of stances clear during this interview—most important, his fear that the incrementally polarized news media are harming the public’s ability to process our present moment. “If you create a situation where the press cannot be trusted, everyone is screwed,” he said. “I think people forgot about the danger of extremism … Of course, politics should solve problems within countries; it absolutely should. But the biggest danger for everybody in the end is extremism. Journalism is one of our dams that mustn’t break.” But in Civil War, it’s everything else that’s already broken. For all the courage of Lee and her colleagues, Garland’s film leaves the viewer tragically unsure of their ability to undo the larger harm.