Culture Thursday: Wasted Material—A Review of Civil War

Civil War is a 2024 film that follows a set of combat journalists covering a second American Civil War.

As a film, it has quite a bit going for it. The firefight scenes are exceptionally well done; they feel legitimately scary and overwhelming. From what I can tell, director Alex Garland did his homework when it comes to depicting combat.

I also appreciate that the film does not shy away from depicting the type of violence that goes on in civil wars. We see people tortured, civilians targeted and the execution of surrendering combatants.

Yet, this is all pretty tame compared to how actual civil wars go down. Take a look at what happened in Yugoslavia during the ’90s or, if you need a more recent example, Syria, Myanmar and Ethiopia.

Despite the wasted potential, the story is a compelling one, and the cast does a solid job at what they were assigned.

A weak point of the film is that the suffering caused by the breakdown in civil society is not depicted very well. Although the US dollar does collapse in the movie and we see refugees, we don’t see anywhere near the level of starvation, disease and deaths from despair that a civil war in America would cause.

In civil wars, death via direct violence is far from the only danger.

Remember the damage the COVID-19 pandemic did to our supply chains? Do you recall how it caused certain goods to skyrocket in price or become much harder to find?

Well, a civil war would do far more damage to our supply chains than the pandemic did even at its worst. Good luck finding basic necessities like food and medicine, much less goods like laptops and computers.

However, the biggest failing of Civil War is its vagueness. It is hazy on the motives of the Trump stand-in, the Florida Alliance and the Western Forces. We don’t know what motivates the individuals who are fighting the civil war or how on earth California and Texas ended up on the same side of anything. We also don’t get a sense of the experiences of the civilians caught in the crossfire.

We get certain hints, such as the president being on his third term, that he bombed American citizens and that he disbanded the FBI. But an unpopular government or even a constitutional crisis does not make a civil war on its own.

Even worse, we don’t know how the Western Forces and Florida Alliance got their hands on such high-quality equipment and personnel or anything about their objectives.

We can infer significant portions of the United States military outright defected. But that raises more questions as well.

With all of this being said, the film wastes promising material that could have made for a great warning film—the caliber as Threads, Requiem for a Dream, or The Day After.

Compare and Contrast

I know of Threads and Requiem for a Dream only by reputation, but I have seen The Day After.

It is a bleak but honest movie about the immediate aftermath of a nuclear war.

The film is direct about how a nuclear exchange would happen.

Spoilers below.

The Day After takes place in the Kansas City Metropolitan Area in Missouri. It follows a diverse set of characters, including an emergency room doctor, several farmers, some military personnel and other everyday Americans as they navigate the end of the world.

The flashpoint starts with the Soviet Union attempting to force the United States out of West Berlin. From there, things spiral until the nuclear exchange occurs.

The escalation in the first half of the film is communicated via in-universe media reports. You can feel the tension and terror as events keep intensifying.

Nobody wants a nuclear exchange, but backing down is not an option either.

In contrast to Civil War, The Day After does not indulge in vagueness in how the world ends. We can infer the motives of the United States and Soviet Union. To a 1983 audience, it is not hard to imagine a crisis where a nuclear exchange happens.

Compare that to Civil War, where the motives of the combatants are unclear.

Real-Life Civil Wars

In reality, civil wars tend to follow patterns, especially in the modern world.

Bitter political, ethnic or class divisions or extreme polarization are often necessary components of civil wars but alone don’t cause them.

The states most vulnerable to civil wars are states either transitioning from an autocratic regime to a democratic government or a democratic state backsliding into autocracy.

Purely autocratic states are usually too powerful to challenge openly, and in democratic states, people have ways to resolve grievances nonviolently. By contrast, states going through this transition in either direction have weak and unstable governments combined with intense factionalism.

Other states that are vulnerable to civil wars are ones where the military has a disproportionate amount of power, states where the central ruling body has serious weaknesses in holding a monopoly on violence or where factionalism is quite high.

On its own, the intense political polarization in the United States is not a concern for civil war. There are plenty of democratic countries that experience nasty elections and divisive leaders.

What has given experts concerned is the breakdown of democratic norms and rules: the increasing stratification, political gridlock and widespread breakdown in social trust.

Worst of all, more and more Americans are comfortable with using direct violence to accomplish political ends. Making this situation more dire, this attitude has infected many of America’s institutions.

Put simply, the democratic safeguards in America’s political system are beginning again to break down.

That is why so many experts were worried about 2020. Trump actively attacked the democratic guardrails in ways not seen since the American Civil War.

President Biden was able to repair some of the damage but not all of it.

That is part of why President Biden must win in 2024. Should Trump win, I don’t know that the country as we know it could survive.

Other Points

In a civil war, trying to stay out of the way is actually the smart play. But in no way are the people trying to keep their heads down the same as those who duck their responsibilities by staying out of politics.

Once violence comes into play, the situation has fundamentally changed.

A civil war today would not look like the American Civil War we are all familiar with. It would resemble the Troubles in Northern Ireland—if we are lucky.

More likely, it would bring to mind the breaking apart of Yugoslavia, the drug violence in Latin America or the Syrian Civil War in organization, brutality and devastation. You can’t just draw a neat line of states anymore. Instead, it would be a county-by-county situation. A complete mess.

Knowing what I know about MAGA, they would behave like Hamas on October 7, 2023, if not worse. Many on the far left would behave the same.

Ergo, if you are a civilian, stay out of the way and, if you can, run for dear life.

If I were to have directed the film Civil War, I would have addressed refugees fleeing to Canada or Mexico, those working for a side behind the lines or civilians trapped behind enemy lines looking to escape, or I would have centered a group of soldiers fighting the civil war.

I would not have focused on journalists, who in reality would just be propagandists for the president or a faction. Had Garland been honest about this, I would have enjoyed the film more.

It is a shame that Garland missed such a monumental opportunity to give a warning.

We urgently need it.