Alex Garland has a penchant for mutually assured destruction. His writing and, in recent years, his directing revolve around this theme; the Danny Boyle sci-fi masterpiece and Garland written Sunshine (2006) consists of characters debating the moral repercussions of saving another spaceship at risk of losing humanity; Garland’s Annihilation (2018) climaxes with a symbiotic reflection of the protagonist’s own trauma, mirroring each other until they are no longer there. Garland seems to harbor a nihilistic outlook on the future, and who can blame him for feeling pessimistic about the future? However, as the brutally, piercingly loud Civil War takes on a version of a near-dystopian American future, it becomes clear that Garland is living a sheltered life, the film becoming a toothless delineation of war as it abnegates the politics it weaponizes.
The genesis for the titular war in Civil War seems to be that the despotic president (Nick Offerman) has allocated himself to a third term while throwing the gauntlet down for people to overthrow him by firing missiles upon the American public. It subtextually invokes a ‘what-if’ on if Donald Trump and his words of incitement that inflamed the January 6th insurrection had succeeded, but it has no insight into any form of answer as to what governmental and hierarchical structures allowed for it to occur.
This review was first posted on April 15th 2024. Full review linked below.
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