In the 1996 movie "Independence Day," Will Smith led a group of fellow countrymen to defeat alien invaders. 28 years later, Smith has been banned by the Academy after the infamous Chris Rock slap and the U.S. has become far more polarized. Now, Americans aren't fighting aliens: in Alex Garland's new movie "Civil War," the disaster is that Americans are fighting Americans.
The film follows a group of journalists: Lee, world-weary photojournalist (Kirsten Dunst), Joel, an alcoholic reporter (Wagner Moura), Jessie, a budding photojournalist (Cailee Spaeny), and Sammy, an old columnist (Stephen McKinley Henderson). These journalists are trying to get to Washington from New York to interview the increasingly besieged "third-term" president. As a result of this civil war, they're driving on back roads and sleeping in refugee camps as they witness increasingly harrowing scenes of a dystopian America -- bombing of civilian targets, extrajudicial executions, mass graves, and torture.
The politics of these sides aren't spelled out, nor is it clear why there is a civil war in the first place. There is an embattled central government in Washington, DC; California and Texas lead the Western Forces alliance; and the Florida Alliance supports the Western Forces. (A24, the studio who produced the film, released a map of the sides for viewers, but the geography isn't terribly important, nor does it map onto red states and blue states.)
But given the current political climate of the U.S. in 2024, it's not hard to fill in the blanks. The presidential candidate of one of the two major parties tried to overturn a free and fair election in 2020 and has celebrated people who used violence to try to do so. According to recent public opinion research from the University of Chicago, approximately 18 million Americans believe that violence is justified to restore Donald Trump to the presidency. In a February 2023 tweet, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) called for a "national divorce" between liberal and conservative states. In this context, it's not terribly difficult to imagine a civil war taking place after a disputed election; around 40% of Americans think that a civil war is at least "somewhat likely" in the next 10 years.
The climactic scene of the film takes place in Washington, as the Western Forces battle the central government. Having lived in Washington during the 2020-21 period, parts of this were not so unthinkable. In real life, as in the movie, there were military vehicles on the streets, military helicopters buzzing overhead, burned-out storefronts, and a president taking shelter deep in the White House. The movie simply amps all of this up and adds that there is a full-scale war going on with automatic weapons and rocket-propelled grenades causing multiple explosions and mass casualties.
In another time, it might be easy to look at the movie's lack of politics and dismiss it as the latest in disaster porn. But given the politics of the U.S. in 2024, a civil war is not so unimaginable: "Civil War" offers a vision of what it might look like.