Alex Garland’s Civil War Underwhelms

.@bfwalter on America shifting to minority White makeup: “To a subset of the White population here this is deeply, deeply threatening… They see the United States as a White Christian country. And they feel like they’re justified to fight to maintain it.” #TheReidOut #reiders pic.twitter.com/OqY03tqmDa

— The ReidOut (@thereidout) January 12, 2022

“Most of the ethnically-based civil wars are started by people who had once been dominant in a country but are in decline demographically.” @bfwalter says the U.S. is closer to a civil war than most would like to believe. pic.twitter.com/twTG0pPlTM

— The Mehdi Hasan Show (@MehdiHasanShow) August 14, 2023

“Autocrats. first of all, they don’t care about peace, they care about power and often times, chaos and instability help them stay in power” @bfWalter shares her thoughts as Donald Trump is showing an authoritarian vision for America #SaturdayShow pic.twitter.com/tIhf0Y7snp

— The Saturday/Sunday Show with Jonathan Capehart (@weekendcapehart) December 9, 2023

There are two groups in America who have spent a considerable amount of time speculating about the collapse of the American Empire and “Civil War 2” over the years.

The first group is the “far right,” which is to say, pretty much everyone in our sphere from White Nationalist authors like Harold Covington to Patriot groups. The second group is liberal academics and journalists like Barbara Walter. I have personally appeared in this literature in the role of the President of the United States. I was assassinated in the Oval Office with a pencil by my mistress. I went to see Alex Garland’s “Civil War” last night so that I could better imagine my own cinematic demise.

As with Harold Covington’s novel Freedom’s Sons, I knew heading into this that the plot of the movie made no sense. There is no plausible scenario where Texas and California have seceded from the Union and are allies in resisting federal tyranny. It is as unlikely as the Pacific Northwest with its strong progressive political bent becoming a militant bastion of revolutionary White Nationalism. I can at least suspend my disbelief long enough to relax and enjoy a good story however implausible it might be.

The problem with Alex Garland’s “Civil War” is that there is no effort made at story telling. We never even learn the name of the president. All we are told is that he disbanded the FBI, used the military against American citizens and has violated the Constitution by serving a third term in office. There was an “Antifa Massacre” somewhere. The president is clearly a stand in for Trump who has turned out to be an authoritarian dictator in office which has sparked the rebellion. Presumably, no effort is made to develop the story because the audience is supposed to implicitly know what this is about.

This movie is about a small group of “journalists” from New York who venture out into the warzone in an attempt to get to DC to interview the president before he is toppled from power. The front line where the Western Forces are massing to seize the Capitol is in Charlottesville. What follows is scene after scene of carnage – looters being tortured by a group of rednecks, bodies hanging from an overpass, a mass grave, Boogaloo Boys getting in a firefight and executing captured soldiers – which appear to be inspired by the Liberian Civil War. We don’t see anything like clashes between modern armies like in the Ukraine war. We never learn who has control of the nuclear weapons. We never see the U.S. Navy.

It is like the director watched dozens of clips of Barbara Walter appearing on CNN and MSNBC and decided to make a movie about it. Kirsten Dunst’s character Lee is clearly based on Walter. She moves from scene to scene, snapping photos and doing her “I can’t even” believe this is happening here act. She is much wiser than us and has seen it all before in conflict zones around the world. It was a relief when her character finally died in a firefight in the White House. The only saving grace of this movie were the final scenes of the Western Forces storming the White House and executing the president.

In sum, “Civil War” is a useful window into what New York-based journalists think Civil War 2 would be like. There are moments in the film when you can take what you are seeing it on screen and imagine you are watching a movie with a plot. The viral clip of the partisan asking “what kind of American are you” was pretty funny. You have probably seen it all before though on CNN and MSNBC.