Opinion: ‘Civil War’ movie is worse than the real thing

The new film “Civil War” is a cinematic achievement: the movie might be worse than a real American civil war. 

Perhaps that was director Alex Garland’s intention. His film is a series of horrifying set pieces — gas station torture, journalists’ executions, a massive California-and-Texas invasion of Washington D.C. — that add up to a warning. If we don’t steer away from our current path of political conflict, Garland suggests, this could be the end of the United States.

To be fair, there’s established logic in this message. As Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran wrote: “When we perceive the end in the beginning, we move faster than time. Illumination, that lightning disappointment, affords certitude which transforms disillusion into deliverance.”

But “Civil War” never provides the illumination or certitude that might save us. 

Indeed, the film is so violent and over-the-top that it feels uncomfortably, well, Putinist. These days, the Russian and Chinese governments routinely promote the idea that the United States is headed for bloody civil war that kills thousands. “Civil War” brings that propaganda to cinematic life.

If the U.S. does see another civil war, it will not resemble the new film’s vision of warring armies advancing on Washington. That’s an anachronism, owing more to the 1860s Civil War than modern warfare. 

Nor will it involve fights between specific states. Our most bitter fault lines are not about geography but about ideology, race, gender, age, class, education. A civil war will map those divides within our cities and neighborhoods.

Indeed, the real challenge of the next American civil war will be perceiving whether it is a war at all. Such a conflict will be fought with cyberattacks, disinformation, and psychological warfare. The battlegrounds will be legal, with warring factions seeking to cancel each other’s rights and prerogatives, and global, with our enemies funding and fueling the conflict while our allies seek to intervene and negotiate peace.

For these reasons, it’s time to retire the idea of California “secession,” even for Californians sympathetic to making California independent by peaceful means. Let’s face facts: The Golden State is never going to break away like South Carolina in 1861. We have no military, and no offensive warfare beyond Gov. Newsom’s Fox News appearances.  

No — if California ever becomes an independent nation, the more likely path will be through a U.S. government meltdown. Unfortunately, that scenario is possible. It is easy to imagine a fascist president, with a compliant Supreme Court and Congress, using his military to punish cities and states he doesn’t like. Such a president might invoke executive powers to shut down Congress or government agencies that won’t bend to his command. 

In such a circumstance, California, without representation in Congress, would have to take on the duties of a nation, and over time would naturally drift away from the disintegrating U.S. to become a separate republic.

To make a great movie about such a American civil war would require a filmmaker with the virtuosity of the late Akira Kurosawa, whose 1950 film “Rashomon” famously tells one story from multiple, contradictory perspectives. 

Garland’s film never comes close. We never get to know the civil war’s combatants. Instead, the director tells his story through the peculiar perspectives of four journalists who come off as callous, or ridiculous. As the president is about to be executed, one journalist asks the soldiers to wait because “I need a quote.” 

Like Garland’s film, it hid from the harder questions by putting journalists at center stage. But for all its goofiness, that 27-year-old film was the wiser, more relevant, and more responsible movie.

“The country is falling apart,” says a TV producer in the satire. “We don’t need exclamation marks.”

Joe Mathews writes the Connecting California column for Zócalo Public Square.