Civil War’s Internal Conflict (Review)
metroweekly.comFor a while now, voices in the mist who’ve had an early peek at Alex Garland’s dystopian thriller Civil War have warned the film might be irresponsible or too incendiary in its brutal depiction of a United States divided and engulfed in war.
In the dire future presented in the film, Americans confront each other in military combat within their own cities, on their own doorsteps.Starring Kirsten Dunst as intrepid war photographer Lee Smith, leading a ragtag crew of journalists into combat zones to capture the harrowing stories and images, the movie certainly does not play shy about showing intense, bloody warfare.
Borrowing violent combat and protest footage from real-life events — and, reportedly, in some cases, from alt-right sources — Garland constructs a tense, at times frightening vision of this country ruptured past the point of no return.
The movie is crafted as a warning, but one with very little context.Civil War truly might have inflamed the culture wars or sparked a rebellion somewhere, if only it had followed through on its nervy portrayal of conflict between the states to fill in the blanks about who’s fighting whom and why.We do know, after an on-air address from the President of what’s left of the United States (Nick Offerman), that California and Texas seceded to form the Western Forces, while the secessionist Florida Alliance is on the march across the South.
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