Alex Garland’s A24 movie Civil War has kicked off a vast, circular online debate over the way Garland frames his story, with minimal background detail about what led to the titular civil war or what the country’s various factions stand for. The argument over how, whether, and to what degree the film represents the actual state of 2024 America has overshadowed a lot of the conversation Garland actually wanted viewers to have after watching his movie. And in particular, it overlooks some of the movie’s finer nuances — like the crucial moment that really defines Civil War’s story.
Alex Garland has a 2-part agenda for Civil War
11.04.2024 - 14:41 / polygon.com / Alex Garland
Alex Garland keeps getting asked the same question about his new movie, Civil War. It’s an obvious question. Garland, known best for Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Men, wrote and directed a movie set in near-future America, centering on a civil war that’s fractured the United States — and yet he reveals very little about how that war came about, or what the warring sides represent. Instead, he tells an almost clinically procedural action story about photojournalists crossing the country to cover that war, without ever digging into the details. Why make a seemingly apolitical movie about an American civil war in an era where so many pundits are worried that we’re on the brink of real civil war?
Garland disagrees with the basis of the question. “I cannot see how it’s abstract,” he told Polygon in an interview ahead of the film’s release. “[In Civil War] there is a fascist president who has dismantled the Constitution sufficiently to be able to stay for three terms, has removed one of the legal institutions that could threaten his position doing that, and is causing violence, attacking his own citizens. It might be abstract, possibly, on first blush — but to me, that does not stand up to any inspection at all, in terms of the actual content within the film.”
That description sounds a lot more direct than the movie actually feels, though. The details above are all things viewers will only pick up from brief, scattered lines of dialogue. As Garland says, the specifics “largely come in by inference,” rather than being major focal points of the movie.
Instead, the film focuses on the world-weariness of veteran photojournalist Lee Miller (Kirsten Dunst) and her writing partner Joel (Wagner Moura) as they travel across the U.S. to Washington, D.C., to interview the embattled president (Nick Offerman). Coming along for the ride: up-and-coming cub photojournalist Jessie (Priscilla star Cailee Spaeny). The film focuses on their emotional responses to the things they see on the trip — Lee’s growing trauma, Joel’s thrillseeker bravura, Jessie’s naive excitement. But the characters never talk about politics, or the lines that have been drawn across America.
And that’s entirely deliberate, Garland says, because the movie is meant to be as politically objective as he could make it. “The kind of journalism we need most — reporting, which used to be the dominant form of journalism — had a deliberate removal of a certain kind of bias,” he told us. “If you have a news organization which has a strong bias, it is only likely to be trusted by the choir to which it’s preaching, and it will be distrusted by the others. So that was something journalists used to actively, deliberately, consciously try to avoid. […] And then the
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