'Civil War' (2024) Review

Alex Garland dares to ask "War: what is it good for?" but offers nothing but empty platitudes and nihilism

*spoilers ahead*

If we had another civil war in the United States, that would be a bad thing.

I think (I hope) most of my readers would agree with that statement. War is, generally, bad, especially for civilians. A full-on shooting war between the Federal Government, various coalitions of states, militias, and vigilantes would bring untold amounts of destruction, would cause countless offenses against human dignity, and would obliterate the American way of life. As divided as we are in the United States in 2024, as many people as are predicting that we might end up in a second civil war, I know of vanishingly few people who actual want that to happen.

Which is why it is so baffling that Alex Garland has made a film seemingly targeted at those few people who think a second civil war is a great and glorious idea. Garland is so committed to making this a “non-partisan” film that any greater message or theme beyond “civil war would be bad. People can be terrible to each other” fails to appear. We have no idea why these two sides are fighting, or what’s really at stake in this conflict. All we know is that there is a war, and it’s bad.

If my review sounds repetitive to you, try sitting through Civil War for two hours.

Garland’s more liberal tendencies bleed through in a few places: for example, The President (played by Nick Offerman) has a lot of Trumpy qualities; one man is killed by a redneck militiaman simply for being from Hong Kong; and every combatant throughout the film is male, with one exception being a black female sergeant who gets to be part of the team that “gets” President DonNick OfferTrump. Perhaps it is no surprise that in a movie from the director of a horror movie called Men, all the aggressors and committers of atrocities are male whereas a West Virginia refugee camp is as racially diverse as a Google Gemini output.

However, these small elements aside, the movie does not get “woke” or really take a political stance at all. It goes out of its way to avoid blaming any of the divisive political issues of our day for the war, trying to create a dire warning for both sides about the dangers of political violence. Red Texas and Blue California are fighting together against the government; the President never espouses any explicit (or even implicit) political positions. I suppose this is to the movie’s credit; a film which outright blamed the other political team for causing a civil war would heighten political rancor, not lessen it.

However, from a thematic and basic storytelling standpoint, it makes Civil War extremely weak. I have no idea why people are shooting each other, which makes me extremely confused and uninvested in this world. Without knowing what drives the two sides, this whole war seems pointless, dumb, and unnecessary. Which, I suppose, is Garland’s point about a real life civil war, but it has the unpleasant side effect of making the movie seem pointless, dumb, and unnecessary.

This choice to be apolitical also leads to some very mixed symbolism and confusing messaging. For one, Garland does not seem to be espousing some kind of “reasonable center” or fence-sitting approach to resolving this conflict. One person is definitely to blame: the President. When he’s dead, so it seems, everyone will calm down and things may go back to some semblance of normalcy. Fence-sitters certainly aren’t depicted well; two main characters bond over having parents who are on farms somewhere in the Midwest “pretending this all isn’t happening”, and one town which seems to have escaped the carnage is revealed to have snipers on the rooftops, jealously guarding its neutrality with violence.

Since the President can’t talk about any political issues of the day, the only rhetoric he’s left with is a devotion to the Union, which confusingly makes him sound more like Abraham Lincoln than any other US president. The secessionists also blow up the Lincoln Memorial during their siege of Washington DC, leading me to question whether Garland was promoting some kind of anti-Lincolnite or anti-Unionist agenda. Is he really saying that the United States should pursue some kind of peaceful break-up, letting go of the Union which Abraham Lincoln fought and died for? Or does Civil War just have sloppy theming and a general ignorance of American history?

You’ll notice that I have said little to nothing about the actual plot and characters of the film. This is partly because most of the interest around the movie centers on its political theming and partly because the plot and characters are boring and unimportant. We see the events of Civil War through the eyes of a quartet of journalists, road tripping through rural Pennsylvania and West Virginia on their way to Washington DC. The characters are fine, although their main function seems to be shuffling us from one shocking episode of violent cruelty to another. The story and characters really seem like just an excuse for Garland to do a modern civil war movie, which is another reason this film simply isn’t compelling on a story-telling level.

Overall, I found Civil War to be confusing, bloated, pointless, and boring. Its shallow nihilism and lack of faith in the common man leave the viewer with little hope for the future and no path forward to avoid the catastrophe it prophecies, while its attempts at apolitical messaging merely obfuscate its point and confuse its viewers. There is little reason to see it beyond curiosity and a desire to have an opinion on “the discourse” about this film, which will last for a week or two and then vanish into Redbox kiosks and Walmart $5 bins. I, alas, fell for it; you, dear reader, do not have to make my mistake.