Headline Roundup • April 12th, 2024
‘Civil War’ Movie: ‘Terrifying Premonition’ or ‘Grandly Tasteless’?
Summary from the AllSides News Team
As America enters a particularly polarized 2024 election cycle, Alex Garland’s “Civil War” movie depicts a near-future U.S. mired in internal conflict. Is it a serious prediction of a dark future, or a shallow story without a real argument?
The Details: A synopsis from IMDb says the film, which released Friday, portrays “A journey across a dystopian future America, following a team of military-embedded journalists as they race against time to reach DC before rebel factions descend upon the White House.”
For Context: Recent years have seen many, particularly on the political right, predicting a civil war over America’s current partisan divide. In 2021, polling by The Economist (Lean Left bias) and YouGov (Center bias) found that 43% of Americans believed a civil war was at least somewhat likely in the next decade.
How the Media Covered It: While some reviews from news outlets took the movie seriously, others were not impressed. The Daily Caller (Right bias) said events in the movie’s trailer “could definitely happen in real life,” but a Financial Times (Center bias) review called the film a “grandly tasteless disaster movie.” Many reviews focused on the movie’s ideological vagueness. While New York Times (Opinion rated Left) columnist Michelle Goldberg said its ideological ambiguity “seems like a source of its power,” National Review’s (Opinion rated Right) Armond White called the “violent fantasy” both “offensive” and “too flimsy to be a cautionary tale.” The Verge (Lean Left bias) agreed, saying the story “doesn’t have the guts to articulate a cohesive, thoughtful point.”
Featured Coverage of this Story
Financial Times
Civil War is the stuff of nightmares in the new film of the same name. American carnage has come to pass in Manhattan, Pittsburgh and beyond. It also looks naggingly sexy. In a slick slab of provocation from writer-director Alex Garland, with Kirsten Dunst as a veteran war photographer, social collapse makes for a pumping blockbuster. Technically, the movie is a wowzer: Apocalypse Now gone TikTok. As always with backers A24, the marketing is beautiful.
Welcome to the movies in 2024. Garland (Ex Machina, Men) plays peekaboo with reality throughout....
Damon Winter/The New York Times
Going into Alex Garland’s astonishing new film, “Civil War,” I expected to be irritated by the implausibility of its premise. I’m not talking about the idea that America could devolve into vicious internecine armed conflict. That seems possible, if not probable. In one 2022 poll, 43 percent of Americans said they thought a civil war within the next decade was at least somewhat likely. I wouldn’t go that far, but I won’t be surprised if political violence spikes after the upcoming election and eventually spirals out of control. I’m pretty confident,...
A24/Trailer image via YouTube
That old political reprimand “Have you no decency?” has lost its force. Politicians and media folk show no compunction about lying and tyrannizing, which is how we get Alex Garland’s shameless new movie Civil War. You can’t trust Garland, one of the least of the demi-Kubricks. His topical subjects are less outré than Yorgos Lanthimos’s; plus, he’s less of a craftsman than David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, or Jonathan Glazer. Yet, in Civil War, Garland tries for visionary virtuosity, faking rawness and sensationalism, all to predict America’s collapse. Designed to be fun, it is,...
