Civil War (2024)

With a $50 million budget 'Civil War' is the most expensive film yet to come out of A24, a production company that has made a name for its self with modestly budgeted art house and horror films. While not so modestly budgeted 'Civil War' is both an art house film and a horror movie, among other things. The British writer/director Alex Garland's take on a worst case scenario of where America's political polarization could take us, a second Civil War. 

In an effort not to alienate half his audience Garland is vauge on the details and the political lines that define the films military conflict. What we do know is that we are in the neighborhood of 14 months into the war which seems to have been triggered by an incumbent president taking a third term. The president is played by Nic Offerman, cast against type he is a tyrant but we never learn what his politics are, if he's a Democrat a Republican or something else. The country has split at least five ways (Alaska's status is murkey), with breakaway confederatesions made out of north westerly states and the deep south, as well as Texas and California seceding individualy, but combing military forces to take on the corrupt federal government.

Our protagonists are a group of four journalists on a roundabout trip from New York City to D.C. for an interview with the president. Kirsten Dunst and Wagner Moura are respectively a war photographer and reporter working for Reuters, their companions are Stephen McKinley Henderson of The New York Times and Cailee Spaeny as a young freelance photographer. This quartet are our surrogates on a road trip odyssey across a balkanized Ameica. Along the way they find fear, atrocities, refugees and in some places a disconcerting normalcy in the face of it all. 

Reporters and journalism are of course central to our current discourse of polarization, but the ones here seem pretty old school, functionally detached observers, who still struggle at times with their human reactions to what they see around them. Their journy climaxes with (not a spoiler it's in the trailers) a military seige of Washington D.C.

The films succeeds at being unsettling, at times horrifying, it brings what we are used to seeing in other parts of the world home. The central characterizations are reasonably good, the films well shot, well scored and the climatic battle delivers on a number of levels. What the film lacks is much of anything to say about why we are so polarized and what if anything we can do about it. It's content to be a kind of national 'scared straight'video, rather then engage in any substantial analysis. Still this is a very zeitgeisty film that takes a refreshing number of risks. ***