Civil War (A24) - Predictions For The Movie, By A Socialist

So, today, A24's Civil War comes out in the United States and United Kingdom. Written and directed by acclaimed screenwriter Alex Garland, and easily the studio's most expensive movie at a $50-billion budget, this is also one of the most anticipated releases of 2024. Against the backdrop of a politically polarised world, Garland dares imagine the unthinkable; what if it indeed "could happen here", and the modern US were to once again be a house divided, descending into open warfare?

Given Garland's undeniable talent, with a strong cast headed by Kirsten Dunst, I have no doubt Civil War will have many qualities that make it worth watching. I know I shall, once the movie opens in France next week.

However, despite being an A24 production, my political inclinations lead me to suspect the movie will be unable to fully escape the Hollywood-liberal trappings of its makers, particularly given its much-discussed "apolitical" approach to the topic.

Thus far I've managed to resist looking up Wikipedia, TVtropes or online reviews. Based entirely on my own assumptions, let's break down the ways I expect Civil War to tick certain checkboxes, shall we?

• The final trailer includes a voiceover line mentioning how "they" will turn on each other. Combined with a shot from the first trailer of soldiers dragging President Nick Offerman from the Resolute Desk, this leads me to believe that the Texas-California forces will manage to execute the evil President; but this isn't depicted as a happy ending, because their alliance instantly collapses the moment after, and the civil war goes on.
• Against all probability, the journalists will succeed in landing that interview with Nick Offerman, yet the President, who is studiously not a Donald Trump analogue, will refuse to provide closure on why he did what he did or how the war started.
• The journalists get their scoop by taking a photo of the President's execution.
• Nuclear weapons will be vaguely hinted at, but never come into play, except perhaps at the very end.
• There'll be no mention of international bodies such as the UN or courts of human rights; nobody will bring up any talk of America invading The Hague.
• You're not supposed to notice, because two of the main characters are played by Wagner Moura (Brazilian) and Stephen McKinley Henderson (African-American), yet aside from maybe a couple of soldiers portrayed by voiceless extras, there will be a suspicious lack of black or Latino people in the movie; crowds of civilians will be uniformly white.
• The script will make a token gesture at addressing the dangers of underlying racism in America, presumably through an obvious white-supremacist figure such as Jesse Plemons's psychotic soldier, who will then shoot Stephen McKinley Henderson. That way, this movie can pat itself on the back for covering this issue, overlooking the fact that it do so by killing the only black guy.

A movie which seeks to portray war as pure tragedy, where the politics are irrelevant to those in suffering, is a worthy and well-intentioned endeavour. In principle, I can approve if this is what Alex Garland is setting out to do; not to take sides, but to remind us that war hurts us all.

However, reports have noted that early on in the production, Garland invited his cast to watch Elim Klimov's Come And See, possibly the most harrowing war movie ever made, one of the few to successfully defy Francois Truffaut's assertion that it's impossible to truly make an "anti-war" movie because we humans are wired for visceral thrills. There is no honour, no glory, no catharsis to be found.

But what I fear Garland may have neglected to consider about Come And See is that this was a movie about fighting the Nazis. And when your enemy are literally Nazis, war is and remains a terrible thing, yet what choice is there except to fight?

The power of Come And See lies in how its climax outlines the Nazi ideology in all its hideous truth.