Civil War, Alex Garland’s hotly anticipated dystopian drama on an America divided by military conflict, knows what we’re looking for. The film opens with the president (Nick Offerman) in profile, practicing lines as he prepares to address the nation. His assurances of strength and patriotism are interwoven with seemingly real, recent news footage: a flash of riot gear, police armed like soldiers, masses against shields, two seconds of a body being dragged. Garland, the writer-director behind such modern sci-fi hits as Ex Machina and Annihilation, doesn’t have to show much from 2020 or beyond to get the point across. We’ll fill in the rest.
This is good news for those who feared Civil War would swerve too close to the present election-year polarization for comfort, or wring entertainment out of the beyond oversaturated national presence and specter of Donald Trump. Civil War, which premiered at the SXSW film festival, introduces the connection and then summarily abandons recognizable politics for the dispassionate work of combat journalists in the moral gray area of the war zone. In a year of red-hot tension and fear, Civil War runs cold – decidedly anti-war but firmly unspecific, assiduously avoiding any direct correlation to current politics or, it turns out, any politics at all.
