It feels painfully real, but it’s impossible to look away

The President of the United States announces on television that his victory has rarely been more tangible. Photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst) turns away from the screen and goes outside. Here people are shouting and demonstrating on the street. A person with a waving US flag runs past. With a confidence that can only come from previous experience, the journalist recognizes the danger and ducks behind a car before the bomb explodes in the crowd. Welcome to the civil war of Civil War.

Alex Garland’s Civil War takes us on a road trip through war-torn America

In the past, director Alex Garland made a name for himself as an exceptional sci-fi talent, especially through his films Ex Machina and Annihilation, as well as as a screenwriter for 28 Days Later and Dredd. With its vision of a second US civil war as a social dystopia, Civil War also, strictly speaking, belongs in the soft science fiction area. In such representatives as The Handmaid’s Tale, future designs explore not technical achievements, but rather developments in the humanities (such as politics and sociology). The story of Civil War takes place in an unspecified time in which the political Conflict of mentally divided America escalates into war is.

On one side there is an increasingly dictatorial president (Nick Offerman) who does not want to leave office, on the other hand the so-called “Western powers” California and Texas who want to overthrow him. This sounds like a dystopia, but when we are thrown into the fray alongside some journalists, it feels anything but fictional. Rather, Civil War seems like a war film based on true events. A contemporary war film. It makes Alex Garland’s action cinema all the more eerie and present, as if robots were taking us to a scenario far away.

On the front lines of Civil War arrives Stunning cast on. The team of reporters sets off in the car on the 875 mile (approx. 1,408 kilometer) journey from New York City to Washington DC in order to hopefully be the first to reach the president who is about to be overthrown. The group consists of four people:

They all create believable characters who contribute to Civil War’s sense of reality and convincingly guide us through the narrative. The supporting characters are no less well cast. Jesse Plemons, for example, delivers his scariest performance since Breaking Bad as a militia supporter with his own mass grave.

Reality meets fiction: Why the sci-fi war film Civil War seems so real

Alex Garland made it clear to The Telegraph in advance that Civil War was born as a thought game out of the dilemma of the polarized USA. The Democratic and Republican fronts have hardened to the extreme. Before going to the cinema, Garland fans should know that this time, unlike his previous films, the focus is not on cautiously tentative negotiations with humanity. Civil War is pure experience: war in the head.

Anyone who starts from this starting point will have a breathlessly thrilling film experience. Clever little comments and observations take us into the war situation. Apparently the US President is in his third term (actually only two are allowed). Elevators are not recommended due to the constant power outages. With 300 US dollars you can barely afford a sandwich, while Canadian dollars are welcome. Even when a fireball shakes the streets of New York in the distance, hardly anyone looks up.

Aside from this successful hint, Civil War grabs us as a war film for another reason: it throws us into the profession in a frighteningly real way by war correspondents. With their cameras they storm into a raging conflict and film people burning instead of saving them. With their press pass as a protective shield, they are not active helpers, but rather uninvolved observers. But what does that do to a person?

Atrocities collide with apparent indifference. Kirsten Dunst’s jaded photographer says in Civil War that she used to have hers “Pictures sent home as warning”. Now the war is still raging in their homeland. While her inactive parents in the province ignore the nationwide escalation, Lee throws herself into the hotbed of the fire. Even if she, Joel and the others hardly sleep at night as a result. The Asking ‘why’ Civil War does not fully answer the question of their actions. But simply by questioning the motivation of its war journalists, the film acquires more haunting depth.

Only at the end of Civil War do the doubts arise

Unlike other dystopian stories like The Road or The Walking Dead, which tell of the fall of civilization from the perspective of a post-apocalypse, Civil War goes straight into the apocalypse. Only it’s not the end of the world like Roland Emmerich’s global 2012 catastrophe, but a War on your own doorstep. It is a fictional war experience that is based on real fears and seems all the more tangible given the current news situation – because it is theirs puts fingers in the wound of our present.

The everyday locations in Civil War that pave the way for the road trip contribute to this in particular: gas station encounters, firefights in apartment blocks and an ambush in the middle of Christmas decorations. Only when we reach Washington DC in the last third of the film does this uncanny closeness to the reality of our own lives shift. Then the war film suddenly turns into a military hunt à la Zero Dark Thirty and 13 Hours – and makes us stumble at the climax.

Civil War repeatedly interrupts the action-packed plot with short snapshots. By the last photo of the film, however, a stale aftertaste creeps in (at least from a non-American perspective) – one unpleasant emptiness when it comes to the subject of war and its methods. In the irreconcilability of the sides, winners and losers become blurred.

In the tumult of the viewing experience, have we come to terms with the purpose of the film too late? At this Final note of discomfort we carry heavily on the way home from the cinema. And that’s good. Because there could hardly be a more worthy ending for a war film.

Podcast: Can war be entertaining? And which is the best war series?

The war series Band of Brothers, created in 2001 by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, is still considered one of the best representatives of the genre. But the follow-up series The Pacific and the newly released thematic sequel Masters of the Air are also exceptional stories in the Second World War.

We introduce you to the three series of the Band of Brothers universe with their land, island and air battles, compare their advantages and ask whether war can be entertainment.