Taylor H Lunsford

One of the top-grossing movies this year is a dystopian thriller about a near-future America locked in brutal civil war. Should we be worried?

This post contains light spoilers for the film.

This past week, Civil War crossed the $100 million gross mark, making it one of the most successful films of 2024 so far and the second-highest grossing entry ever from indie production company A24 (after 2022’s collossal surprise hit Everything Everywhere All At Once). Millions of viewers in the US and around the world have watched this film, which is full of frank and graphic depictions of war crimes set not in some faraway country, but in the streets of Brooklyn, on a rural Pennsylvania highway, and inside the DC beltway. What did writer-director Alex Garland (whose previous work includes Ex Machina and Annihilation) want to tell us with this film, and did he succeed? What does the runaway commercial success of this bleak film signify?

Civil War follows a team of war photographers and reporters on an Apocalyse Now-style journey through wartorn America towards the heart of darkness, with each stop along the way a disturbing vignette from the realities of civil conflict. Scenes that could have been plucked from the headlines of real-world civil wars in places like Myanmar or Yemen are transposed into familiar American settings with unnerving effect. A UNICEF refugee camp set up in a West Virginia football stadium is a particularly eerie and effective case of taking something Americans expect to see “over there” and putting it into a starkly American context. The backstory of how this American civil war began, and how it might end, is obliquely addressed in a few lines of dialogue, but world-building takes a back seat. Garland’s main focus is on confronting audiences with images of the day-to-day horrors that real civil war often brings.

Here’s what the film tells us about the titular civil war: a three-term authoritarian president, compared in one line to Mussolini and Ceaușescu, controls the federal government and is at war with factions of secessionist state governments. The strongest secessionist army is the Western Forces, an alliance between California and Texas that has driven east to besiege DC and overthrow the president. We hear about other secessionist groups, like the Florida Alliance of southeastern states, who are in a “race to Berlin” with the Western Forces to see which side can sieze the capital first. It’s not clear how long the conflict has been going on at the start of the film, only that much of the country has been devastated and American life has become full of violence and terror.

The film often refers to real-world politicial touchstones but rarely expresses an opinion on them. The front line of the war is in Charlottesville, North Carolina, site of the 2017 “Unite the Right” white supremacist rally that ended in the murder of a counter-protestor. One of the main combat scenes of the movie pits boogaloo-coded rebels in tropical shirts against uniformed soldiers fighting for the corrupt president. And there’s a reference to an alt-historical event called the “Antifa Massacre,” although from the context it isn’t clear whether Antifa was doing the massacreing or among the massacred. Garland uses touch points like these to link the film’s conflict to our own times in ways that are emotionally and psychologically impactful even if they don’t add up to a real analysis of our current problems.

Some viewers have complained that Garland’s political centrism and unwillingness to take sides leaves the message of the film muddled. I disagree- the power of Civil War is in its depiction of how messy and unintelligible real-world civil war can become. The political disputes between warring factions are abstract. The violence, hunger, and terror are concrete. The film shows us that even outside of combat zones, scarcity and rationing has led to local militias who deal out harsh, arbitrary justice against looters. Fighters with no connections to the White House, the Western Forces, or any other major faction are locked in chaotic local struggles. And in the most chilling scene in the whole film, the heroes stumble upon an unidentified group filling a Srebrenica-style mass grave. These sequences don’t need an elaborate political backstory to be effective.

In interviews, Garland has said that the movie was intended as a paean to journalists who risk their own safety to get the public the closest thing they can manage to raw, unadulterated truth. The crew of journalists at the heart of the film are meant to be flawed but heroic. In this regard, I thought the film fell flat. I often found it easier to relate to the soldiers engaged in combat than to the journalists buzzing around them in pursuit of “great pictures” (I imagine many other veterans who saw the film feel the same). “War photographer” is certainly a dangerous and courageous job by normal standards, but in the context of a brutal civil war we see again and again that the journalists are actually a privileged group, insulated from many of the dangers and hardships faced by others. The characters themselves doubt the value of their work- they couldn’t prevent the civil war, and they feel powerless to end it- but continue to document the conflict out of a mix of duty and vainglory. The ambigious ending of Civil War suggests it may have all been for nothing.

What can we take away from Civil War? First, it should be said that Garland’s exact scenario is unrealistic. Plenty of viewers have joked that only a foreigner could imagine a California-Texas military alliance (Garland is British). But the film is undeniably effective anyway. This speaks to modern American anxieties about polarization, loss of trust in government and media, terrorism and mass shootings, and the overall health of our democracy. The film’s impartial lens (a product both of Garland’s own centrist views and the journalistic integrity of his characters) allows different viewers to map their own perspectives and fears onto the conflict while reminding us that high-minded principles are often the first casualties of war. I hope that Civil War‘s shocking images of a tattered America serve as a cautionary tale and a reminder of what is at stake.