As one of A24’s most expensive films, rumored to cost around $50 million, Alex Garland’s “Civil War” is seemingly part of the indie studios’ bigger swing to make more mainstream movies. It’s almost an ironic statement, given that contemporary political films commenting on a current political climate generally do pretty terribly at the box office; aka, a movie about Trump during the Trump administration likely would have tanked in theaters. Historically, films about the Iraq War during the war (or even years after) did quite poorly, so the conventional wisdom is that Americans do not want to engage with the politics of their time in their entertainment.
But “Civil War” has been tracking to a huge $20-plus million opening so far—a very good number for an A24 and contemporary political films. So, perhaps Garland’s movie could buck this trend and reshape the moviegoing disinclination to avoid these kinds of films at the box office.
In a recent new A24 first-look featurette, Garland called the movie “a war film in the ‘Apocalypse Now’ mode,” referencing the guerilla filmmaking style of Francis Ford Coppola’s classic guerre movie. “It’s a graph of ramping adrenaline and intensity leading to an invasion of Washington D.C.”
Starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, and Nick Offerman, the film is set in the near future, where a rapidly escalating Second American Civil War has engulfed the entire nation. The plot centers on a team of photojournalists following a team of military-embedded journalists as they race against time to reach D.C. before rebel factions descend upon the White House (read our review here).
Various reviews have called it a rather visceral and harrowing experience, and even Dunst said she experienced a type of PTSD shooting the movie because it was so realistic and troubling.
However, one of the main criticisms of the film is how vague or frustratingly politically neutral it is, seemingly both sides-sides, with the argument of tyranny, rebellion, and authoritarianism.
But in a new Entertainment Weekly interview that has revealed many new photos, Garland said the political “opaque” -ness, while potentially frustrating, is, by design, meant not to impose his political views on the movie and make it more of a subjective experience for the viewer for better or worse.
One controversial scene is apparently described as an “Antifa massacre,” but it doesn’t explain whether the killings were committed by or upon left-wing militants. And again, Garland said, that’s the point.
“The viewer is required to make their own interpretation,” he explained. “The film is actually being opaque. It’s forcing the viewer to ask questions. Now, I know there are some people out there who don’t like that, who want films to answer every question. They don’t like being confused about the intentions of the people making the film. They want to be reassured. But as I see it, film is a broad church. There’s lots of different people making lots of different sorts of films. I want to make them like this.”
Garland told EW that casting someone likable like comedian Nick Offerman as the President Of The United States was purposeful because “you can’t quite pin him down.”
“I put my own opinion into things, but I don’t put them front and center because I don’t want to shut down a conversation,” the director explained. “There’s a really simple example of it in ‘Ex Machina.’ That whole movie is about, ‘Is this machine sentient or not? Does it have consciousness?’ Towards the very end of the film, there’s a shot of the robot smiling, and she’s on her own. So, then, it must be conscious. There’s my answer, but it doesn’t have a big flag attached to it. I’d say ‘Civil War’ has equivalents of that, but I don’t want to focus on them. The point of a conversation is that you’re not shouting, ‘This is what I think, and this is what you should think too!’ Then it’s something completely different. And to be honest, there’s enough people doing that shouting, and they’re welcome to it. They’ve got Twitter or X or whatever the hell it’s called, where they can knock themselves out all day and all night.”
It’s probably not an argument that’s going to appease critics who were maddened by the approach, but it does make sense. What Garland is hinting at is that his views are—very likely anyhow, knowing his work—very liberal, but offering that point of view is probably just leading the witness too much, and it’s probably best for the viewer to come to their own conclusions.
“Civil War” opens in theaters on April 12 and will be available on IMAX screens, too. Check out the intriguing new first-look featurette below.
