Writer-director Alex Garland stages a spectacular if evasively apolitical “civil war” in this futurist-dystopian action thriller, involving hundreds of extras lying on the road next to upturned blackened cars with CGI-mutilated buildings in the smoky distance. The film’s fence-sitting reluctance to name any of the issues that might actually result in a civil war arguably means that the film can be enjoyed by the widest possible audience base. But the whole thing does finally snap into shape for a Call of Duty melee in the heart of American democracy, an ugly denouement possibly riffing on the January 6 Capitol attack, in which something seems to be clearly at stake and which (belatedly) gives us a glimpse of believable horror and delirium.
The scene is an America whose evident but unspecified divisions have exploded into open fratricidal warfare. The states of Texas and California are now ruled by the rebellious secessionists, the Western Forces, or WF, making massive advances on Washington DC, a situation about which the president (Nick Offerman) is in denial, making delusional TV addresses about how well he’s doing.
