Alex Garland says Civil War is a hot take about journalism, but it isn't sci-fi

With every new trailer for Alex Garland’s A24 action movie(?) Civil War, it looks increasingly like it comes from an alternate reality, and not just in the sense that a civil war is happening in the United States between the federal government in D.C. and the “Western Forces” of California and Texas. There’s also the tough-to-swallow fact that the Western Forces of California and Texas have somehow made it allllll the way through thousands of miles of heartland to reach the White House (which they will do on July 4, as teased in the first trailer), and that the apparent bad guys have made it so close to D.C. that there are snipers positioned on top of New York City skyscrapers, but still there are people outside of major cities who somehow have the privilege of staying out of the whole thing.

A24 released a new trailer today that is much heavier on the war stuff than the first one, including the dramatic shot of soldiers blowing up the Lincoln Memorial. Veterans of Call Of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 may be desensitized to this kind of destruction, but the studio is probably hoping this kind of imagery is particularly chilling to everyone else… even if it’s all still a little silly and it does make us wonder how any opposing force, let alone one from the complete other side of the country, made it close enough to launch a rocket at Abe’s house.

But, lack of any recognizable form of reality aside, Garland recently told Empire that—despite some people suggesting otherwise—he doesn’t think of this as a sci-fi film at all. “There’s no ‘sci’ in it, for a start,” he says, perhaps implying that the threat of a divided nation is all-too-real. And sure, it is, but this vision of that dark reality just seems so puzzling, which Garland also suggested to Empire is part of the point of the film: “I tend not to spell things out in films,” he says. “I sometimes feel overly spoon-fed by cinema, and so I probably just react against that. That question, why Texas and California, is a question that I want the audience to ask.” So that either means that it’s a literal plot point in the movie, which seems like it might fall into the “overly spoon-fed” category, or that it’s supposed to confusing or disorienting.

That’s all secondary to the real message of Civil War, though, which is that journalists are important. The movie follows Kirsten Dunst as a journalists making her way through civil war America, telling the stories of the civilians who try to stay out of the whole “war” thing and the soldiers with their dyed hair and red glasses. “Journalists are vilified, often, by all sorts of different people,” he says in the Empire piece. “It’s not necessarily a side of the political spectrum. And the truth is that if you want a government with checks and balances, you need journalists.”

Again, yeah, he’s right. We just hope the journalists in this movie can explain how and why Texas and California teamed up when they are historically on opposing sides of the political spectrum, don’t share any borders, and are significantly outnumbered by the rest of the country (in terms of population, land mass, and access to fresh water). Or maybe this is all part of the plan, and Garland is trying to inspire divisiveness like this to prove how easy it is to topple the empire. Maybe Civil War is really super smart?