I never thought a second civil war on these American shores was possible. But with the demonic enabler Donald Trump and his masturbatory emissaries of evil leading the charge against everything that is good, moral and right in this country — and possibly this world — I no longer think that.
This wrong-headed and criminally active idea is caustically brought to life (death?) in the 2024 dystopian travelogue Civil War. As speculative fiction, it’s a brutally entertaining movie, but as far as a precursor of hellish things to come, it is frighteningly plausible.
So cast your votes and get your bulletproof vest on, too, I guess.
In the not-too-distant future (concurrently?), America has torn itself apart. A civil war rages with mutually panicked civilians with no sides, brutally gung-ho soldiers of misfortune and a third-term president (a shrewdly cast Nick Offerman) who grinds the gears of the manufacturing of war.
In between it all, a small group of Associated Press journalists try to be impartial of the battle surrounding them as they try to document it. Lee (a hardscrabble Kirsten Dunst) leads her team of photographers into the belly of the beast, all trying to reach the endgame destination of war-torn Washington, D.C.
Along the way, we meet disaffected “patriots” who string up tortured bodies in an overpass, innocent kids still playing on a football field, a small town trying to distance itself from the war, both sides of the skirmish playing dress-up with bullets, and members of the unregulated militias doling out the most brutal justice in the lawless world.
Fuck Mad Max — this is the true vision of the apocalyptic future.
Written and directed by Alex Garland, it patiently stokes the already fanned flames of a country teetering on the brink of real soldiers, real bodies and real war. It’s a vestigial trope that Garland more than explores and, even better, excels in, given its distinctly European veneer.
Hopefully, our country will place this movie in the scarred waste bin of alternating timelines that we will never have to truly deal with. But, in case Civil War is a razor-thin dividing line between freedom and slavery, voting your conscious is not part of this world, but the only part of this world. —Louis Fowler