At a recent screening of his new A24 movie Civil War, filmmaker Alex Garland was asked about his seeming interest in dystopias, and he asked in turn for the audience’s indulgence for a moment as he wanted to “get nerdy” about the actual definition of the word. Specifically, he described it as the opposite of utopia, an environment so idealistic as render itself fantastical or impossible. (His point seemed to be that dystopias can arise any number of ways, hence their frequent appearance I his work.) True enough that many of Garland’s films as both a writer and a director take place in some form of dystopia, but even more striking is how fixated they are on the endings of things. Plenty of films (including some of Garland’s) imagine post-apocalyptic conditions, but Civil War, like many of Garland’s other work, seems more interested in the process of the apocalypse itself, whether it’s coming slowly, with increasing velocity, or tumbling down all at once – before the dust settles on a longer-term dystopia. Collectively, his work feels like a pick-your-poison menu of how we’re going to wind up ending it all.
Garland’s earliest screenplays were collaborations with director Danny Boyle, after Boyle and his go-to screenwriter John Hodge adapted Garland’s novel The Beach into a film. (Garland didn’t actually work on that film, which does, actually, feature an attempt at a creating a utopia of sorts, although of course it doesn’t last – an apocalypse in miniature.) In 28 Days Later, a man (Cillian Murphy) wakes up from a coma to discover that London and the rest of the world has been ravaged by a zombie-making virus; it seems like a cut-and-dry post-apocalyptic situation, yet there’s still room for pockets of humanity to end things further, as the characters learn during the blood-simple climax at a makeshift military base. His second Boyle film, the terrific sci-fi thriller Sunshine, is a little more cheerful, in the sense that this time Murphy is part of a last-ditch but cooperative effort to save humanity by jump-starting the dying sun.
Garland’s films as a writer-director are less apocalyptic in narrative but arguably doomier in tone. Ex Machina ends with an artificial being’s escape from the private tech-bro lab that birthed her. She doesn’t have designs on ending the world, but there’s menace in the film’s closing moments, where she disappears seamlessly into a crowd. Annihilation follows a group of women on a voyage into the “shimmer,” an expanding, otherworldly zone that has emanated from a meteor crash site and quietly, gradually threatens to replace mankind with a series of doppelgängers, though the immediate threat feels far more disquietingly personal. Men zeroes in even further, into the breakdown of male behavior and how it shapeshifts and twists around in front of a woman (Jessie Buckley) trying to escape her horrific past.
Civil War, by contrast, is Garland’s least fantastical movie ever. Everything else with his name on it has some element of the uncanny, even if they’re dark, horrific, or hallucinatory variations. Civil War is only fantasy in the sense that its basic set-up – the United States is being torn apart by an armed conflict between a secessionist alliance of multiple states and a fascist three-term president who has eliminated the F.B.I. – has already been run in the fevered imaginations of any number of doomsaying pundits and/or soldiers-in-waiting. As with 28 Days Later, Sunshine, and Annihilation, Garland follows a small team of people who have decided to make their way through the chaotically altered landscape. In this case, it’s a group of journalists including war photographer Lee Smith (Kristen Dunst), her reporting partner Joel (Wagner Moura), New York Times veteran Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), and unaffiliated, aspiring photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), traveling together to Washington, DC, in hopes of being the first to interview and photograph the press-hating president before the Western Forces (one of several secessionist factions, this one an alliance between California and Texas) reach the capital.
As a Brit, Garland seems hyper-aware of the logistical weirdness involved with a war-torn contemporary United States – the sheer amount of space that would be covered by this conflict, inevitably leaving large pockets of tranquil-looking but questionably safe ground. The movie distends the space even further, counting down the miles on a NYC-to-DC road trip from somewhere in the 800 range. (In reality, they’re about 200 miles apart; the characters mention something about having to take a roundabout route to avoid certain areas, though a distance-quadrupling detour still seems pretty substantial.) That experiential, what-if aspect of the movie, combined with the clarity of Garland’s images, combined with the world-weariness of Dunst’s characteristically excellent performance, combined with (if you’re lucky enough to see it this way) IMAX-sized capturing of both the mayhem and the tired, frightened human eyes observing it, make Civil War a bracing experience.
There’s also a certain amount of bravery in stripping away the sci-fi trappings of Garland’s previous films – because without them, Civil War looks just as much like a horror show, but with more visible architecture. In other words, characters’ deaths, when they happen, tend to feel as predictably patterned as any slasher movie. This is a weird thing to be thinking during a sober-minded war thriller, but there we are, thinking it, maybe because the movie itself doesn’t have a lot of other thoughts to provoke. Though he clearly flags the president as a fascist, there’s a vaguely both-sides-y, thought-experiment vibe to the way Garland flips a military campaign that inevitably recalls January 6th into an uprising against a dictatorial leader, rather than in favor of one. Though he tries to keep the specifics vague in favor of focusing on the journalists, even his ambiguity winds up looking a bit tidy. The movie is so tight, well-honed, and streamlined (coming in well under two hours) that it sometimes feels like it’s been stripped of ideas to make it speedier and more aerodynamic.
What remains are evocative truths that, in this telling, also feel a little like dead ends. It is true that divisions in belief feel sharper and more dangerous than ever. It is probably true that a modern-day civil war within the United States would turn the country’s romanticized vastness into a logistical nightmare, and true that journalists dispassionately covering war risk turning themselves into emotional shields, absorbing horrors up close, often so that a portion of their audience can avert their eyes. Once the immediacy of those ideas fades, Civil War starts to look more like a technical achievement than a work of art.
Maybe, in a perverse way, that’s what Garland is after. Of all his films as a director, this one puts the most definitive period at the end of its sentence (one character’s sendoff utterance almost functions as a punchline), and may be the least emotionally satisfying of the bunch, give or take a Men. Ex Machina and Annihilation portend their apocalypses with individualized insidiousness, the end times disguising themselves as humanity. Civil War is undisguised and, for all of its elusiveness, unambiguous about how a country might annihilate itself, however the blame is ultimately divided. That straightforwardness is what makes it so gripping in the moment – and maybe a little redundant when it arrives at its own ending.
Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.
