Filmmaker Alex Garland was joined by his long-time collaborator and producer Andrew Macdonald in Edinburgh to ponder their career-spanning relationship, favorite projects andupcoming 28 Days zombie trilogy.
The duo, who have teamed up on titles such as The Beach (2000), 28 Days Later (2002), Ex Machina(2014), and most recently, Civil War(2024), spoke at an Edinburgh International Film Festival event on Sunday to a jam-packed room of industry professionals (who were hanging onto every word).
Garland and Macdonald discussed how they came to work together, as well as a few rows they’ve had over the years. Garland, who began his career as a novelist with The Beach before pivoting into screenwriting and, eventually, directing, admitted that while he doesn’t particularly enjoy directing, there is one film – his debut directorial feature – that he considers his top pick from an impressive resume.
“I never wanted to be a director,” Garland says, before prompting audience laughter with: “I wanted to stop directors from changing things and the only way to do that was by occupying that position [of director].”
“I enjoyed Ex Machina very much… It was an easy film to make. It was logistically easy, and that helped. We had four weeks in [London studio] Pinewood on a sound stage, two weeks in Norway on location. We had a very small cast.”
Ex Machina stars Domnhall Gleeson as a young programmer who becomes part of a bizarre experiment at the house of a genius scientist (Oscar Isaac) where he forms a relationship with a female robot (Alicia Vikander).
“The cast were young and very hard-working and very committed,” Garland continued. “We had a very friendly crew that believed in the project and was working as hard as they could. There was a good vibe, and everyone was pulling together. It was friendly.”
Garland elaborated on some “toxic” movies he and Macdonald have worked on, drenched in “bitching” and “fallings out,” and why Ex Machina came at just the right time. “Speaking for myself, but I always speak for Andrew too,” he said, “we had just done a sequence of toxic movies and toxic film sets are extraordinarily unpleasant places to be. You cannot escape the bitching, the factionalization, the departments falling out with each other. They’re just terrible. And I think Ex Machina came as an antidote to that. It was the precise opposite.”
The iconic scene where Isaac and his robot break out into dance, memorialized in “gif” form, came about from his own critique of Never Let Me Go, Garland explained, where Garland had learned that a film requires a “disruption of tone.”
Garland and Macdonald also spoke about the upcoming trilogy of films following on from apocalyptic thrillers 28 Days Later and 28 WeeksLater. In 2025, 28 Years Later, with a budget of around $75 million, will mark the start of a set of three films from Boyle, Garland and Macdonald. “We’re making, hopefully three more 28 films with the first one called 28 Years Later that Alex has written, and Danny has directed, and has finished shooting,” Macdonald said. “Then we’re just about to start, tomorrow morning, actually, part two. And then we hope there’s gonna be a third part and it’s a trilogy.”
Macdonald said the films will be a British sci-fi trilogy with an all-British cast set in the north of England, specifically Northumberland and Yorkshire.
Garland and Macdonald separately touched on the difficulties of making the recently-released Civil War, set in a dystopian future America where a team of military-embedded journalists are attempting to reach Washington D.C. before rebel factions get to the White House.
“We literally couldn’t go to America,” Macdonald said of the COVID pandemic complications. “We had to wait and then we had to get special visas to go. And we made it just at the tail end of COVID. We made it with the backing of A24, who, from a producer point of view, were just amazing, because they backed what Alex wanted to do with one of the biggest budgets they had ever spent at that time.”
When asked about the political nature of the film and claims that Civil War “doesn’t pick a side,” Garland let loose. “I’m in my mid 50s and I’m a centrist,” he said. “That’s where I am politically. I’m a centrist. I’m left-wing centrist. So I write and I think and I talk and I move through the world in a centrist position. The idea that centrism is not a political position is idiotic. It is a political position. It is a political position against extremism. It’s actually specifically against the extreme right, I would say, because that’s the greatest danger that democracies tend to encounter, and they do encounter.”
He continued, “If you take that danger seriously, then centrism is a position you can take. It doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right one. It’s my one. The idea that centrism is apolitical is just stupid.”
Civil War, written and directed by Garland, has grossed over $122 million worldwide.
Edinburgh International Film Festival runs until Aug. 21.
Fans have been waiting a long, long time for another installment in the 28 Days Later franchise, and we now know when the next followup is coming out: June 20, 2025. Per , Sony Pictures announced the release date for the upcoming film 28 Years Later on Friday. It would have been kind of cool if it were timed with the original film’s actual 28th anniversary in 2030, considering how close we are to that now (horrifying, I know), but I can’t blame them for not keeping people hanging even longer.
28 Days Later, starring Cillian Murphy in what turned out to be his breakout role, came out in 2002, and was followed by a sequel with a different cast, 28 Weeks Later, in 2007. There were at one point murmurs of plans for 28 Months Later, but it looks like we’re skipping over that. The new film will be directed by Danny Boyle and written by Alex Garland, who both helmed the first movie, reported earlier this year. Murphy will be among its executive producers, according to Variety, but don’t get your hopes up for seeing him in a starring role. As of now, it doesn’t seem like that’ll be the case.
We don’t know anything about the plot yet, but 28 Years Later will reportedly star Jodie Comer, Aaron Taylor-Johnson and Ralph Fiennes. And it could be the first of three new movies in the franchise. According to THR, the plan is ultimately for a trilogy.
Sadly, it’s not really a stretch to imagine the United States finding itself in a second Civil War. Perhaps this is why writer-director Alex Garland doesn’t get too specific on the details of “why” (racial tensions, political divisions, an unhinged president—take your pick from a gamut of ever-brewing causes). In fact, Garland in general is not a “details guy,” preferring instead to focus on the “big ideas” of what he’s saying. And what he’s saying here isn’t necessarily related to being a “cautionary tale” (in truth, he appears to view another civil war in the U.S. as a mere inevitability), so much as the need for “elder generations” to do whatever they can to ensure the success of the younger ones, no matter how fucked and ostensibly beyond repair the world might be.
Garland’s (or A24’s) decision to release the film months before what is likely to be an extremely fraught and polarizing election is surely not a coincidence. The Trumpian president (played by Nick Offerman, always happy to seem Republican), after all, ends up invoking this Civil War after, from the errant bits of dialogue that allude to it, taking an illegal third term, dissolving the FBI and banning the press from Washington, D.C. It is through the lens (no camera pun intended) of the press, as a matter of fact, that viewers are made to see this war unfold and reach its denouement.
At the center of the “war photojournalism plot” is Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), a wizened, ultra-jaded war photographer that’s been traveling the country with her colleague, Joel (Wagner Moura), to cover the calamity. At the outset of the film, the two are in New York City, where Lee initially encounters the twenty-something woman she’ll end up grudgingly (at first) mentoring. Jessie Cullen (Cailee Spaeny, continuing to come up in the world since starring in Priscilla) approaches Lee in Brooklyn (a milieu that’s no stranger to the carnage of Civil War fighting) to gush about being a fan of her work.
In this moment, one gets an All About Eve vibe from the narrative (especially when Jessie takes a picture of Lee taking a picture), and it could have gone in that direction many times were it not for Lee’s open embracement of Jessie’s aspiration to become the next great war photographer (just like another Lee with the last name of Miller, who, yes, also comes up in conversation). Rather than resenting or feeling competitive with this young talent, Lee does what she can to “subtly” direct and advise Jessie—not just on her style, but the unique and often soul-crushing demands of this job.
Before this dynamic forms, however, Lee does her best to avoid Jessie’s hopeful gaze and eagerness to learn. Alas, that plan goes to shit when her protective instincts kick into high gear upon seeing Jessie get caught in the melée just before a suicide bomber detonates himself in the crowd, sending bodies flying everywhere. Ducking down with Jessie behind a police car, Lee has it effectively confirmed for her that this girl is way too naive for the war photography game, therefore way too much of a liability (and not just an emotional one). And yet, as Joel and Lee’s mentor, Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), point out, the only way to become a war photographer is to just get out there and do it—glean the brutal, sobering experience that will help shape you into one of “the greats.” Besides, Sammy adds, Lee was about the same age when she started out, too.
So it is that Jessie maneuvers and, let’s face it, manipulates her way into their dangerous expedition once Lee is “out of frame,” appealing to a drunk Joel in the hotel that she tracks them to (stalker much?). Sammy also wormed his way into the journey, but he has the pedigree and seniority to make such a request. Even though he knows that, at his age and level of decrepitude, he could be just as much of a liability as the novice. As for Lee and Joel’s “mission” with regard to venturing into the highly dangerous D.C., their dogged purpose is to snap the last photo of the president before Western Forces overtake the White House and invariably pop the “commander-in-chief” off.
That the Western Forces are comprised of California and Texas seems a bit odd, as does the fact that the “Florida Alliance” is on California’s side. Mainly because, in a scenario where a Trumpian president takes dictatorial control, it would be unlikely—fascist president or not—that the ultimate red states of Texas and Florida might 1) want to secede from the Union and 2) join forces with a “pinko” state like California. Even so, American viewers can overlook such a discrepancy (as is usually the case when British writer-directors give their perspective on the U.S. [see: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri]) if forgiving enough.
However, Garland insisted the choice was “intentional” and done “partly to get around a kind of reflexive, polarizing position that people might fall into, that’s one thing, but actually that’s not the main thing. The main thing is to do with how the president is presented and what can be inferred from that. Then it’s saying that two states that have a different political position have said, ‘Our political difference is less important than this.’” Garland added, “And then the counter to that is if you cannot conceive of that, what you’re saying is that your polarized political position would be more important than a fascist president. Which, when you put it like that, I would suggest, is insane. That’s an insane position to hold.” Clearly, then, Garland is vastly underestimating the insanity of Americans.
In any case, just as American viewers can get over this hard-to-fathom alliance, Lee can forgive Jessie her shortcomings in favor of seeing her potential as they spend more time together. Even though she mocks the “demographic” of the backseat of their Press SUV for being on the polar opposite spectrums of “retirement home” and “kindergarten,” Lee slowly loosens up just enough to allow something to happen that she never does: becoming emotionally involved (in truth, the secret to her success is avoiding that at all costs).
This “cardinal rule” of being a war photojournalist is, to be sure, what Jessie learns better than anyone by the end of the film. An ending that is foreshadowed by Jessie asking Lee if she would simply take her picture if she saw her being killed. Lee responds, “What do you think?” This exchange occurs in front of a crashed helicopter decaying in the parking lot of a post-apocalyptic J. C. Penney. In point of fact, one of the most horrifying things about Civil War is seeing that the “ruins” of America amount to nothing more than depressing malls, office space and gas stations (in other words: what the hell are these people actually fighting for?). That’s the so-called American legacy. Granted, the U.S. has produced some worthwhile entities. Like the American institution that is Madonna. Who once said of her 2003 MTV VMAs performance with Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera that she was effectively “passing the baton” to the next generation of pop princesses with those “controversial” kisses (even though few people remember the one she shared with Xtina).
What one can’t help but take issue with when it comes to how that metaphorical phrase is thematically wielded in Civil War (namely, with its conclusion) is that it presumes “old” people have to step out of the way after the baton is passed because they’ve now done all they can. It’s someone else’s turn to try. However, if Madonna has shown us anything after 2003, it’s that the “aged” still often dance circles around the fearful and complacent young (who occasionally stumble into “right place, right time” circumstances like Jessie). And that a “mentor type” can coexist peacefully enough with the subsequent wave of youth (just look at Lana Del Rey and Billie Eilish) without needing to “stand back” or dim their own light.
In this regard, Civil War averts the All About Eve relationship between mentor and mentee in that the Margo (Bette Davis) of the equation—Lee—isn’t painted as being “averse” to supporting new talent by continuing to try to “eclipse” them. Then again, some “old” talent can’t avoid being naturally eclipsing, can they (e.g., Dunst’s performance being far more praised than Spaeny’s)? Even after making a big production about “passing the baton.”
Alex Garland’s Civil War, about reporters covering a conflict in the United States at some unspecified future date, might be the most controversial movie of the year. From the moment the film’s first teaser dropped, Garland, an English writer turned director, was criticized as politically clueless for envisioning a scenario in which a rogue president would be targeted by a coalition of Texas and California (which have nothing in common when they vote in national elections), and also for releasing a film on that subject in the first place during an election year with the same presidential candidates as 2020, one of whom tried to nullify the other’s victory. The discord surrounding the movie increased after its premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival, where Garland said in interviews that Civil War avoided political specifics on purpose in order to start “a conversation” while refusing to speculate on details the movie didn’t include; instead, he said that it was mainly a love letter to journalists, war reporters in particular. There were also gripes that the film was more violent, slick, and loud than substantive, and perhaps represented an “Emperor’s New Clothes” moment for the director of Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Men, all of which were hotly discussed by genre fans but have yet to form a critical consensus.
Garland spoke to Vulture for an hour in Los Angeles recently, elaborating on his decision to avoid political specifics and what responsibility he has to the 2024 American electorate, and digging into more nebulous questions about the relationships between screenwriting and directing, a movie and its audience, and artists and the eras in which they make art. Garland clarified his decision to step away from — though not, as has been previously reported, entirely quit — directing, saying that it was not driven by criticism of him or his latest film, but in fact dated back to the filming of Civil War two years ago.
How are you feeling right now? Or is that a trick question? It’s a fair question. It’s weird. Selling movies, which is basically what I’m doing, is not normal human interaction. It just isn’t. It’s always a little bit odd. This movie is particularly odd, so it amplifies the weirdness. I can normally relax slightly more when I’m doing interviews, and I’m more guarded, more careful, choosing words more precisely — or attempting to.
I do need to ask you — You can ask whatever you want.
Why would you want to stop directing? It’s a complicated thing. What I said was “for the foreseeable future,” and I mean that in a literal sense. I’m working on four — in a way, five — film projects at the moment, none of which are for me to direct. They’re for other people. So I’m working hard, and I consider screenwriting to be a form of filmmaking. Prior to directing, I functioned as a screenwriter, and I don’t think it’s lesser. I just think it’s other. It has different obligations.
You have a family, yes? Yeah, two kids. I shot a bunch of stuff really back-to-back. I was away a lot, away from home a lot, away from life a lot. That is a contributing factor to the decision. But also I think temperamentally I’m a writer who opted to direct, rather than someone who always had a burning desire to direct. The first film I directed, Ex Machina, I did to protect certain scenes, to not leave them open to discussion.
Alicia Vikander and Domhnall Gleeson in Ex Machina. Photo: Universal Pictures
Protect them from whom? From whoever the director might be. I just wanted to remove that voice for a period of time. And that would have been true with this movie as well. Like, there would be certain scenes in the way they’re unfolding that I would have found impossible to watch if they weren’t unfolding in the right way.
Which scenes in Ex Machina were you concerned about being mishandled or misinterpreted if someone else had directed the movie? It would have had to do with the specificity of some of the dialogue. On the day, in the moment, there might be an actor who suddenly doesn’t feel like a line is fitting in their mouth, and they say, “Hey, can I say it like this?” And the director, who may not understand the exact reason a particular construction of sentences is in there, might say “sure” and then it’s gone and something is lost. There would be many moments in Ex Machina to do with a specific way something is being described.
Did your concerns have to do with the story’s sexual aspects? Absolutely, yeah. It’s a thought experiment I often have: I’ll think of a script and I’ll imagine, What if X directed it? What if Y directed it? What would happen? And in Ex Machina, there was just some stuff that was close to a line and that could not go over a line. It isn’t always the case, but I’ve had a few experiences where stuff in a screenplay was getting changed in a way I couldn’t stomach. Sometimes I would then turn into a kind of pit bull, which I don’t like doing and I don’t want to be. And sometimes I would just have to shrug.
Was it a case where you felt the intent or the quality of the writing had been compromised or mangled? Or was it simply “That’s not how I would have done it”? On occasion, it might be “That’s not how I would have done it.” But often it wasn’t to do with — this is going to sound like a contradiction with what I just said — the exact words; it would be to do with the exact meaning behind the words. You could actually change the dialogue and hold on to the meaning. That would be completely unproblematic. I’ve never cared about that. But the meaning of a scene can completely change, and the role of a scene within a story can completely change.
Can you give me an example? I’d rather not.
Maybe later? Privately, I could do them easily! I could reel them off! But then also you get confronted with another weird thing, right, which is: So the film is not as you intended, but who cares? Does it actually matter? Film is collegial.
In theory! In theory. I think the way I work is pretty collegial! But what will happen is, there will be some things I care about massively, and it has to be that way on that thing. But in and around that thing, there’s enormous latitude to change things, and I’m actually looking for other people to elevate it past the point that I would have been able to consider.
So these four or five new projects you have in the works are all things where you’d be okay with saying, in effect, “Fly little bird, leave the nest, whatever happens is okay”? Correct. It’s to do with … to me, it feels like my last four films as a director are a sequence of films which are following a sequence of thoughts. Civil War, I think, as far as I can tell, ends that sequence.
What is the sequence? Is it “the science-fiction sequence”? “The speculative-fiction sequence”? I probably lean towards science fiction. Fiction is almost by definition speculative —but speculative to degrees, and sci-fi is definitely at the far end of one of those degrees. I also think sci-fi sort of allows for or even encourages big ideas, which is nice. You don’t have to feel embarrassed of them, actually. Sci-fi audiences kind of dig them.
But no, to answer your question, it has more to do with a set of thoughts I had about how to present arguments within a film as conversation. I’m not saying I’m always successful at that, only that it’s a private set of thoughts that I’m following through on.
By “arguments,” do you mean not making a case for or against a thing but rather a dialectical exchange of ideas? Exactly, and a kind of inclusive one. Bear in mind, I’m not saying I always manage to do that. One of the things I have to do is be careful about what I say because that would disrupt the conversation between the film and the audience, you know? I recently watched All That Jazz, which I hadn’t seen for a really, really long time. And while I was watching, I was having what I felt was an intensely personal conversation, I guess, with many people but also with Bob Fosse’s psyche. Would that conversation be helped by Bob Fosse giving me a memo in addition to the film he made? I don’t think it would have helped. I think the film would have been diminished, you know?
I wondered if the reception to Civil War at South by Southwest, as well as the negative or critical reaction to some of your comments in interviews, played into your announcement that you didn’t want to direct anymore. No, no, no, no. The decision predated that. In fact, it located itself in my mind in a clear way while I was shooting Civil War. That’s when I started stating it sometimes to people I work with, just to give them a heads-up: “Hey, I’m gonna be taking some time out for a while, right after this.”
Time out to write? Well, no. It’s slightly more complicated than that because I’m about to do a film with one of the crew from Civil War, a guy called Ray Mendoza, who was our military adviser. In postproduction on Civil War, Ray and I started discussing a film, and I said, “You should direct this because a portion of what directors do is have answers to questions. It’s not the only thing a director does, but it’s a very important part of what a director does.” And in the case of this particular story, the person who has the answers to those questions is Ray, not me. As soon as Ray takes the position of a director, a particular authority is conferred that is then useful for the execution of what he’s talking about. But I also knew there would be some areas that it wouldn’t be fair to expect Ray to have to answer, like, “Why is the camera moving? Should this be a close-up? Should it be a developing shot? Now should we pop out to a wide shot?” So I said, “Let’s share this responsibility.” It’s not directing in the terms I myself would think of as directing.
So a Ray question would be something like “What’s the military objective in this scene, and why are they using this particular type of formation?” Oh, it’s more than that. That would be a Ray question, but it would go well beyond that. This is, in a very profound way, Ray’s story.
What can you tell me about the film? The film is an account of a real event. That’s basically what it is.
An event for which Ray Mendoza was present? Absolutely. Notionally, in a credited way, it’s a co-written script. But really, on my part, it’s an act of transcription and organization rather than what I would normally think of as screenwriting. That will also be true with the directing. Actually, in a way, the writing of the script is an echo of the way I suspect the film will get made.
Let’s return to Civil War for a second. What year is the movie set in, more or less? It’s not, like, five years from now, is it? In my mind, there were some things I was very specific about as a background sequence of events.
I ask because Jesse and Lee have a conversation where Jesse is talking — —about a massacre, and there hasn’t been a massacre in the movie.
Right. She says Lee took famous photos of something called “the antifa massacre.” We don’t know if it was a massacre by antifa or of, but it seems clear that it happened a long time ago, when Jesse was a child or even before her birth. That would mean this story has to be set at least 20 or 25 years from now, right? Yeah. But as for the vehicles, the phones, the sort of textural stuff of real life — a vehicle which is seven years old now is probably not going to be around 25 years from now, right? And there are a lot of vehicles in the film. In that respect, you couldn’t date this story. What you could do is apply a logical sequence of events that are alluded to within the film, which, to my mind, would allow for the situation we see depicted. But you can’t say, “Starting in 2024, here’s what happens: A, B, C, D.” The way in which some people can create huge graphs for a fantasy epic with multiple parts and figure out the laws and the timelines would be a wasted exercise on this movie!
Cailee Spaeny and Kirsten Dunst in Civil War. Photo: A24
All that being said, I don’t know that anything depicted in Civil War is inherently more far-fetched than the 2019 Los Angeles of Blade Runner or Anthony Burgess’s future England in A Clockwork Orange, which, according to the author’s notes for an early draft, was set in 1980. No, it’s certainly not inherently more far-fetched than either of those stories.
It’s interesting: Blade Runner is drifting towards something that is more closely related to our reality because of changes in artificial intelligence. And Clockwork Orange was always closer to reality because it was talking about the haves and have-nots, the Establishment’s fear of violent delinquency, what measures might be taken, whether those measures would work, whether they’d be reactionary or whatever. And that argument, I think, probably belongs to that period. It clearly scared the hell out of Stanley Kubrick at the point when he released the film and thought, Hang on, this is folding into reality quicker and more seriously than I thought possible.
When I rewatched A Clockwork Orange recently I was startled by how much of the grammar of that film has inserted itself into film grammar generally. Kubrick was a freakishly influential filmmaker.
The equivalent of one of those novelists or playwrights who is actually adding words to the language. Is AClockwork Orange the first film where you have a group of young men walking towards the camera in slow motion and then, within the slow motion, a moment of violence floating out? I’m just curious.
One thing we can say for sure is it’s the scene that made a lot of other directors go, “That was cool — I want to do that in my movie.” And they did do it. Scorsese, especially. Let’s go back to Civil War again, though! No, no, I wanna stick with A Clockwork Orange because when I was talking about Civil War being an extension of a sequence of films and something I’ve been working through, bringing in A Clockwork Orange speaks directly to the thing — which is that there’s a disconnect between the intention of a filmmaker and the way a narrative is received. Not only is there a disconnect; it’s a good thing that there’s a disconnect because it involves the imaginative life and it’s built into the terms of conversation. Everything I say to you and you say to me, just in our talking, may not be fully understood either way. Conversation is in some respects impressionistic. It’s connected but impressionistic. And film is a really good exercise in demonstrating that. Clockwork Orange, for example, should mean either slightly or very different things to different people, and that is in no way problematic.
Speaking of problematic: There were complaints after the trailers and after the South by Southwest premiere that it was unrealistic to think California and Texas could be allied against the president because California votes Democratic in national elections and Texas votes Republican. I explained it to myself as, well, there are large numbers of Republicans in California who hate the rest of the state and want to secede; maybe they’ve seceded or taken over by that point in history, and that’s why California is allied with Texas. But maybe I’m wrong? One of the reasons the film does not specify the reasons behind Texas and California is to consciously, deliberately leave that space as a source of engagement.
So my speculative interpretation — Is as valid as mine.
And it’s not necessarily wrong? It is explicitly not necessarily wrong. What I would say is that all the thoughts put together, I hope — whatever disagreements you and I might have — a consensus would arrive from those things. Which, because I’m a fucking science nerd, I’m going to demonstrate to you now. [Garland takes out his phone and calls up the screenshot below.]
Photo: Galton Board App
Okay, what are we looking at here? What we’re looking at is a Galton Board. It’s a series of ball bearings falling and it’s a random 50-50 on which sides of each of these shapes they bounce. But a consensus appears as a product of the accumulated states. That orange line shows the state of the consensus.
So if you applied this to an audience’s reaction to a film, could this Galton Board perhaps represent the fullness of time rendering a consensus verdict? This is how I’m feeling watching All That Jazz. Bob Fosse might be there [points to the left side of the board], I might be there [points to the right side of the board], but this is the shape [points to the peak in the middle].
What do you make of the obsession with “solving” ambiguous endings and filling in every last bit of imaginative negative space in a story with explanations, backstory, and lore? Seems anti-art to me. I totally agree, but it’s worth pointing out that even if you do attempt to fill every single gap in a narrative, you will still not get this perfect, harmonious, unified response to every single moment and every single beat. It just never appears! The quest is quixotic, you know? I think most mainstream movies do exactly what you said, and they are open to less interpretation than the other kind. But I suspect if you go on any film website, you’ll see fans angrily arguing over the meaning in a movie that already explains everything.
Refusing to explain everything is not a flaw. But it sure does make people mad! The most satisfying film I saw last year was Anatomy of a Fall. It really does not answer one of its own central questions, and that in no way bothered me. In fact, I liked it even more for not answering it. But then there’ll be other people who walk out and throw their hands up in disgust going, “What the fuck? Did she do it or not?”
That’s funny because there are people who will insist that the film does in fact give you an answer, just as there are people who insist Zodiac gives you a clear idea of who the Zodiac killer was. That would be another subjective response. Here’s another thing that’s interesting: I just don’t really care what the filmmakers say, personally. But what if the filmmakers say, “No, no, we gave an answer — it’s there, it’s this,” but I didn’t see it? Does that mean I saw the film incorrectly? I don’t think so.
I don’t know. But I do know that sometimes my misreadings of a film are as interesting to me as what the film is actually saying, because of what it reveals to me about myself. Exactly. My whole journey over this sequence of films was a playing out of exactly what you just said. I felt with Civil War, this is as good as I will ever be able to do.
Are you comfortable saying what the film is about in a very general way? What I can say is that Civil War is about a state. I don’t mean a state like a country; I mean a state of thinking, which is divided and contains a path to forms of extremism so there is something of the real world located within it.
Every science-fiction film is about the time in which it was made. For sure. That’s one of the reasons I love sci-fi.
Therefore, Civil War is about our time too? Yeah, I hope so — and I hope so in a kind of thoughtful and conversational manner.
What would you say to somebody who accuses you of being irresponsible for making a film like Civil War and releasing it during an election year? The truest thing I’d say about that is I honestly don’t know whether it’s responsible or irresponsible because I would need to know too many things I don’t know in order to be able to answer that question. But what I do think is that there’s a converse, a counter to that, which is “What’s the consequence of not saying things? What’s the consequence of silence? Of silencing oneself or silencing other people?”
What is the film warning us about? Two things. If I was going to be reductive in a way, and I’m not inclined to be reductive, I would say that — paradoxically, considering the subject matter — the film is about journalism. It’s about the importance of journalism.It’s about reporting. The film attempts to function like old-fashioned reporters. That’s thing No. 1.
What’s the other thing? Just a simple acknowledgment that this country, my country, many European countries, countries in the Middle East, Asia, South America, all have populist, polarized politics which are causing and magnifying extreme divisions, and the end state of populism is extremism and then fascism.
That relates back again to journalists because you have governments with checks and balances, but you need this other thing, which is the press — free, fair, but also trusted. And at the moment, the dominant voices in the press are not trusted. They’re trusted to a degree by the choir they’re preaching to but not by the other choirs. I’m in my 50s. When I was a kid, if in what the old days was called a “broadsheet newspaper” ran a story about a corrupt or lying politician, it didn’t matter whether you were a reader of that newspaper or not, the impact would be enormous and very likely would end that person’s career. That world has gone.
It’s funny because so many movies still end with a video or audio recording being played publicly to prove that someone is corrupt, and the implication is that the bad person was fired or sent to prison. It worked perfectly in a 1970s paranoid conspiracy thriller because the heroes got the story out, and the sinister government course or the sinister corporate course was screwed by the story having come out.
Why is that kind of ending hard to accept now? It’s a consequence of three things. One is powerful external forces: politicians who deliberately undermine trust in the media for their own ends because it’s useful for them to have the media be distrusted. Social media creates an enormous amount of noise and counternarratives and theories that just create a kind of static over all of the information; it has a tonal quality which is often akin to shouting. And then also, very large, very powerful media organizations, which found themselves driven less ideologically than by advertising, needing to target audiences and hold on to those audiences. That became more important than unbiased news reporting.
It’s easier to get people to listen to your message if it’s one they already agree with? Yes, and that works very well. But it doesn’t work well for everyone who sits outside of that audience.
How does this relate back to the mentality of the journalists you depict in Civil War? They’re reporters. They’re reporters. The era I grew up in was an era of reporters in news journalism.
It doesn’t seem to matter to the reporters in Civil War if they’re embedded with the good guys or the bad guys. Why would it? They’re reporters.I think we need those kinds of people because we need for journalists to be trusted because they are the people that hold governments to account. And governments will, at times, regularly, predictably become corrupt.
What was the influence of your father, who was an editorial cartoonist, not just on this movie but on who you are? Huge. In two really significant ways. Every night Dad would watch the nine o’clock news because he’d be looking for a story that he’d do a cartoon about the next day. All of — not all, but the vast majority of — his close friends were journalists. My godfather was a foreign correspondent; my brother’s godfather was a different foreign correspondent. They were around the kitchen table; they were sometimes living in the house. I grew up listening to them. Like the journalists in this movie, they could be spiky, they could be difficult, they could be compromised or conflicted, but there was a kind of purity in this one aspect of their work that they were deadly serious about.
The other thing is Dad was a cartoonist, so I grew up around drawing, and I grew up around comic books. Comic books are sequences of images, and that’s, basically, even as a screenwriter, I am offering up sequences of images and editorial decisions. The scene ends here, and this image contrasts with the thing you just saw, and that carries its own implicit meaning or complication.
It’s so interesting hearing you talk about your father’s influence and journalism because, now that I think about it, your films feel reported. Like you’re going, “Here are the characters, here are the issues they have conflicts over, here is the story, here is the ending. Whatever you make of all this is up to you because I’m on to the next thing.” That’s exactly it. And I am aware that the attitude pisses some people off because they want the reassurance of knowing where the filmmaker stands with regard to various issues.
I remember when Ex Machina came out, I had arguments with people about the ending, where Ava leaves Caleb trapped. Some people wanted her to take him along or at least free him. How do you feel about that? Her point of empathy was the robot played by Sonoya Mizuno. Those two empathize with each other. They were in the same boat. She was in a prison; she was trying to get out. Kyoto, Sonoya’s character, empathizes with Ava. That would be my answer. But I find it interesting that people said it was cruel or non-empathetic, that it proves AIs don’t have empathy. I was like, “Empathy with who?”
It’s astonishing to me that Ex Machina came out ten years ago. You have a sequence where the creator, Nathan, takes Caleb into the laboratory and talks about how he used his power as a tech billionaire to basically eavesdrop on every communication in the world to create this AI. That’s what’s in the news now, that very thing: the scraping of information without consent or compensation to create an agglomeration that machines plug into. I always felt a real skepticism with these tech leaders. Because they work in tech, we make an assumption that they’re geniuses, and they’re very quick to also make that assumption about themselves. And I sort of think, Eh, you’re entrepreneurs. It just so happens that you’re not in milk production; you’re making social media or whatever the hell it is. That doesn’t confer on you any special status at all. And as the years roll by, that’s the other thing that’s been demonstrated — they’re really not geniuses. They’re just people with a lot of money and a lot of power. That in itself doesn’t make a genius.
Was Ex Machina a warning? I definitely thought about it in those terms. It was actually in the TV show Devs that I really went further down that line. In fact, one of the characters in Devs, one of the computer programmers, says he’s not a genius, he’s an entrepreneur.
Do you ever read the news and think, Yeah, I called it? I never think my stuff is prescient. I know there’s a big conversation happening about these issues at exactly the same time that I write things, so I know it’s not prescient; it’s more sort of factual. I think people are very, very good at correctly anticipating problems. They’re just terrible at doing something about it. They just don’t act.
I organized two screenings of Annihilation, and afterward, the audience had an astounding number of different interpretations of the film: that it was about the uncertainty principle, that it was about grief, that it was a metaphor for cancer. There were assorted theological readings. I wondered if you had a specific reason for making that movie. If I was going to be very reductive about Annihilation, it would probably be about self-destruction, that that could include cancer or behavior or any number of things. But this is true of all the films I make: It’s not one goal, one thing; it’s a set of thoughts. Ex Machina is that too, explicitly. It’s just easier for me to talk about the things that are explicit, like machine sentience, rather than the things I hope will float out, such as gender — where gender resides, whether it’s conferred or taken, that kind of thing.
Another thing I noticed about your movies, as both writer and writer-director, is that they are filled with people choosing to place themselves in harm’s way, whether they’re Ava trying to escape the complex, or the journalists in Civil War, or the crew in Sunshine trying to plant a bomb that will reawaken the Sun. That’s quite interesting.I’ll refrain from talking too much about that and getting a bit autobiographical, but I do sometimes think there’s a part of me that is thoughtful and there’s a part of me that is delinquent. And I can see the delinquency.
What do you mean? Delinquent in the “potential droog” sense, or in some other sense? Holistic.
Holistically delinquent? In some respects. You know, people have different sides to their personality and character. I can see it clearly in Civil War. It’s thoughtful and it’s conversational, and I think it would be fair to say it’s also highly aggressive. The two things are just right next to each other. In these films, there’s something very restrained and also something unrestrained.
That’s also true of 28 Days Later. Danny Boyle and I like working on a long-term sequel to that. He’s in prep now, and it starts shooting pretty soon.
What a shitshow it must be in that world 28 years later! Well, in some ways yes, but in some ways no. We had a kind of deal between us, which was to not be cynical, and I think both of us are sticking pretty hard to that principle.
You called yourself a science geek earlier, and you obviously enjoy getting philosophical, but you’re not much for explanations, are you? I don’t have any explanations! The larger the searchlight, the larger the circumference of the unknown.
Titled Warfare, the film is rumored to be a dramatization of events that occurred during the Iraq War in 2006 and that earned Mendoza, a former Seal Team 6 member, a Silver Star “for conspicuous gallantry and intrepidity in action against the enemy.” The cast includes Noah Centineo, Taylor John Smith, Adain Bradley, Michael Gandolfini, Henrique Zaga, and Evan Holtzman.
Imagine a film about war. Then, imagine a film about journalists. Somehow, Ex Machina’s Alex Garland fashioned one of the most compelling stories of the year by marrying these unlikely premises. Even more unlikely? He convinced A24 to make an action film. Don’t worry, this is not a souped-up Marvel movie. It’s exactly what you’d expect from our favorite indie studio’s first venture into the action genre: subversive, thrilling, and intrepid.
After wowing audiences with films like Ex Machina and 28 Days Later, it’s no surprise that director Alex Garland’s latest dystopian effort is unsettling and awe-inspiring. The highly anticipated film is already rated 93% on Rotten Tomatoes after premiering at SXSW 2024.
At a SXSW panel, Garland gave some insights into what it means to make a movie about the dystopian future that feels so close to being real. While movies like Contagion and Garland’s own 28 Days Later felt prescient at the height of the pandemic, no one could have predicted that. But Civil War feels like a nightmare we’ve all been having for the past decade. It’s comforting, in a way, to know others are experiencing this nightmare too. But it’s dread-inducing to see it play out on screen and think: this is us. This will be us. Soon.
And that’s precisely the state of anxiety Garland wants us in.
“Cinema is inclined towards whatever it’s presenting itself, and it’s inclined to not being anti-war,” Garland told the panel at SXSW. “To accurately present the action, it contains adrenaline. And if you add music to that, and you add a certain kind of imagery to that, essentially, it becomes seductive.”
Garland didn’t want to make a sexy war movie. He didn’t want to give us an easy watch.
His solution: making it as disorienting as possible. Unexpected musical moments, atrociously violent cuts of brutality, and gore abound.
“That De La Soul track [that plays during a pivotal scene] had a particular function which was to be jarring and aggressive and speak somehow to the perverse pleasure in what was happening,” Garland explained.
From the score to the cinematography, Garland has managed to make a war movie that does not, in any way, glamorize war. To do that, he had to keep the audience anxious and tense The product: the most stressful watching experience I’ve ever endured. But my god, it was worth it.
Civil War is set in a not-too-distant future when California and Texas have seceded, and the ensuing civil war has caused chaos across the United States. A team of war photographers and journalists make a dangerous journey to Washington DC with the goal of interviewing the President before American democracy falls.
It stars Kirsten Dunst in a career-best performance as jaded photojournalist Lee, alongside Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Nick Offerman, and Jesse Plemons.
It’s a war movie. An action movie. A morbid road trip movie. But above all, it’s a nuanced ode to journalists. “I wanted to make journalists the hero,” said Garland. “In any kind of free country or, let’s say, democracy, journalists are not a luxury, they’re a necessity. They are absolutely as important as the judiciary, the executive, or the legislature, and they are literally as important as a free press that is respected and trusted. Now, journalists have done some of the work to be distrusted themselves. But a lot of other interested parties have been complicit in making them untrusted. And I think it’s unhealthy. And I think it’s wrong. So I wanted to put journalism at the heart of it.”
Though the characters are complex and flawed, we spend enough time with them in a van to cause us to not just love them, but respect them. We believe in them. We believe in their work. If the film’s action doesn’t manage to seduce us, we are seduced by the characters’ prevailing idealism in such dire times.
It’s prescient, too, to be celebrating war journalists — people with nothing to protect them but cameras and press vests — in the current global climate. Garland could not have anticipated Civil War would be released at a time when many of us are quite familiar with the names of press journalists across the world — Motaz, Bisan, Plestia. Outfitted with far less ego and equipment than the journalists in this film, the reality of journalists in Palestine is impossible not to recall while watching Civil War. It adds another thread of reality to the film that makes it all the more effective.
Is Civil War (2023) good?
Civil War pulls off Garland’s intended feat of creating an unequivocally anti-war war movie. But it’s by no means flat or didactic. The tapestry of scenes the characters encounter keeps the film moving. With each stop they make and each new character we meet, we learn something new about this world — and about ourselves.
This is perhaps the most impressive accomplishment of Civil War. It tells us about ourselves.
Garland shows us ourselves in the characters, in the polarized nation, and in the scenes of atrocity, the film never shies away from. “The first season of The Handmaid’s Tale did something very interesting, which was it had bits of imagery that would seem shocking. But as you’re watching them, you realize there was a real-world allegory or parallel. We basically did the same thing,” revealed Garland.
“The scenes are referencing moments from the real world. But not, it’s important to say, exceptional moments. Moments that you would expect in any war. And in a way, that’s part of the point. I think it was necessary to do that if one is going to be anti-war. Some of the sanitizing might pollute the message.”
The film is also tremendously evocative emotionally because it is so immersive. The film offers the audience the chance to feel like it’s behind the camera by following the photographers and revealing the shots the characters “take” during the film. And to get the shot, we go with them into the line of fire.
This is where I make my plea: you must watch Civil War in IMAX. Wrapped in the giant screen and surrounded by the full power of a fantastic soundtrack, this was the most immersive watching experience of my life — even more than any 3D film I’ve ever seen or Oppenheimer … sorry, Christopher Nolan. As if we needed the movie to feel more real, IMAX puts you right in the thick of it.
Ultimately, Civil War isn’t really a warning — it doesn’t make political moralizations. But it’s a call to action. Or a call to remembering. It urges us to appreciate, above all, perspective and truth.
Civil War has its wide release on April 12, 2024. Prepare your nerves. Watch the trailer here:
The $50 million movie about a divided America is a big swing for A24 as it tries to produce bigger movies, marking its most expensive production to date.
There are clearly split feelings about the film. Moviegoers only bestowed it with a B- CinemaScore, while PostTrack exits were mixed. Overall, more than a third of the audience was male. Imax runs are a boon for the movie and are turning in 48 percent of the gross.
The story follows a wartime photojournalist (Kirsten Dunst) and her colleagues as they make their way across a hostile United States of America that has been torn apart under the authoritarian rule of a three-term president (Nick Offerman).
Yet the film shies away from red state/blue state divisions, and the politics behind the conflict are generally left unexplained, other than to say that one of the president’s first actions was to disband the FBI in an apparent nod to former President Donald Trump, who has called to “defund” the Bureau.
Interestingly, the movie played best in the South and South Central regions of the country.
Civil War‘s timing surely isn’t a coincidence as it hits cinemas amid a contentious election year in which President Biden and former President Trump are once again the leading candidates for their respective parties as Trump seeks to return to the White House
At a SXSW panel following the film’s premiere, Garland said it made sense to release Civil War now, although it’s not as if there is anything new about the contentious political discourse gripping the country.
Reflecting the division in the country whose internecine conflict it vividly depicts, Alex Garland’s Civil War splits unevenly in two, alternating brutally effective and disturbing sequences of violence with caesuras of conversation and uneasy respite. The former, with their amped-up urgency and ratcheting suspense, display an impressive filmmaking mastery, but the latter strive for a level of sociocultural insight that they regrettably never quite reach.
Garland deliberately withholds the backstory that would explain how a near-future U.S. descends into warring factions, and he provides only the barest hint of what’s transpiring in most of the country. We’re briskly informed that the Western Forces — an eyebrow-raising union between Texas and California — are making a final push toward Washington, D.C., with the federal government in imminent danger of collapse. Civil War implies that multiple groups (with perhaps opposing goals) are actually engaged in battle — a Florida Alliance is referenced, and armed, uniformed soldiers with unspecified affiliations and unknown intent periodically appear — but, again, Garland refuses to clarify, preferring to keep his audience lost in the fog of war.
Civil War unfolds over a few wildly eventful days, following a quartet of journalists as they set off from New York on a circuitous road trip to reach the capital before it falls. Writer Joel (Wagner Moura) and storied war photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst), a reporting team from Reuters, are in pursuit of an interview with the president (Nick Offerman) — an ambition that seems, given the rapidly deteriorating situation and the administration’s enemy-of-the-people attitude toward the press, both impractical and suicidal. Joining the pair on the journey are aging New York Times reporter Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and aspiring freelance photojournalist Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), who provide, in somewhat pat fashion, the contrasting perspectives of the skeptical veteran and the wide-eyed naif.
As noted, Garland and cinematographer Rob Hardy — a longtime and essential collaborator — stage Civil War’s action sequences with stunning brio and verisimilitude, uncomfortably immersing us in chaos. The film features two adrenalizing battles in which the journalists embed with attacking troops. One is the climactic assault on the White House, but Civil War’s undeniable centerpiece is an agonizingly protracted confrontation with soldiers dumping a truckload of bodies into a mass grave. Shortly after the journalists encounter a pair of colleagues on the road, Jessie and one of the new arrivals are taken captive and threatened by this squad of apparent malefactors, and Lee and Joel attempt to negotiate their rescue.
Joel makes what seems an eminently reasonable argument: “There’s some kind of misunderstanding here. We’re American.” But the coolly menacing soldier who interrogates them (an extraordinary but unbilled Jesse Plemons) remains unmoved and even amused. Balefully gazing at the journalists from behind disconcerting red sunglasses, he pointedly asks: “OK, what kind of American are you?” The reply to that maddeningly opaque, ultimately unanswerable question will determine life or death. It’s a scene that boils the film’s admonitory theme down to its essence: If we continue to turn up the heat to eliminate impurities, everything will evaporate, leaving nothing but the scorched-black bottom of a no longer usable melting pot.
Garland has said that he intends Civil War as a companion piece to Men (2022), which offers a critique of toxic masculinity and the ways in which one bad man births another (quite literally, in the film’s fantastical body-horror conclusion). Civil War is less abstract and metaphorically inclined than Men, but in its lack of grounding particulars, the movie wants to offer the same kind of universal message rather than limit its applicable lessons to the United States. Although I understand the impulse — our country is clearly not alone in sorting its occupants into us and them (red state and blue state, rural and urban, Black and white, patriot and traitor, immigrant and native-born, and on and on) — the sketchy nature of its world-building muddies interpretation. Most problematically, Civil War suggests that the president is a Trumpian autocrat — for example, it’s mentioned almost in passing that he’s serving a third term, which would indicate a defiance of the 22nd Amendment. Is the insurrection therefore an effort to restore democracy? If so, that would seriously complicate our attitude toward the rebels.
As much as I appreciate the film’s heroicizing of journalists — the media can certainly use the positive press! — Civil War also provides an oddly conflicted and almost cartoonish view of the profession. Lee laments that her celebrated combat-zone photography, which she hoped would harshly illuminate war’s devastating effects, had no persuasive impact on the current conflict. She appears weary, utterly defeated. What then is her purpose now? Is there value in her pictures beyond the aesthetic? Especially ludicrous is Lee and Joel’s pursuit of a presidential interview. Beyond the implausibility of securing an audience, what possible news do they think will result? And what would prompt a newbie photojournalist like Jessie to shoot on film rather than digitally in the midst of conflict? She would need a substantial supply of expensive, difficult-to-obtain film stock, and changing rolls under fire and on the run would seem a pointlessly high hurdle for a novice.
These complaints, however, don’t diminish Civil War’s legitimate ability to provoke. Garland says that he wants the film to prompt conversation, and by not making explicit what either side of the conflict represents, he perhaps allows for at least a tentative reach across the yawning divide. But even if we stay warily siloed in our respective bunkers, Civil War’s grim vision of a riven America provides a sobering look-what-can-happen warning. Sadly, like Lee’s photos, Garland’s film will no doubt prove ineffectual despite its considerable power. We’ll know as early as November.
One of the most surprising, exciting pieces of movie news so far this year is that writer Alex Garland and director Danny Boyle are going back to the world of 28 Days Later. Over two decades since the groundbreaking original zombie film and 17 years since its follow-up, the pair are getting ready to make 28 Years Later.
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Speaking to Garland on the occasion of his latest film, Civil War, io9 asked him why now was the right time to go back to the franchise that launched his career.
“It was partly to do with the passage of time,” Garland told io9 over video chat. “It sounds dumb, but you get locked in. Originally I wrote 28 Days Later as almost like a gag. It was making a caption into the title. You know, ‘12 hours later,’ ‘The next day,’ except make it the title. And then you’re stuck with it. [Laughs] You got to live with the thing. And 28 Months Later would have seemed weird given the amount of time that had passed. And, 28 Weeks Later, someone had already done it. And so our last time frame, unless we start moving to centuries, was 28 years. And enough time had passed to justify that right.”
But, of course, there were a few other big factors beyond just the timing. “Danny was interested in doing it, the producers were interested in doing it, and I had an idea,” he said. “I had not really had an idea that I was interested in prior to that. It had been floated. We’d talk about it. Every five years or something it would get discussed, but I had no motivation to do it. I said, ‘Look, if someone else wants to do it, that’s fine, but I haven’t got anything.’ For some reason, that passage of time unlocked a particular concept in my head that the film then goes with, and so, suddenly it made sense. I said, ‘Okay, I think I’ve got an idea.’ And I wrote it as a script, and showed it to Danny and Andrew [Macdonald] and Peter [Rice] who are the producers, and they said, ‘Yeah, okay, let’s do it.’”
Plus, Garland confirmed that the overall idea is for the series to be a trilogy, if audiences turn up for it. “That was key to the idea was it was a story that couldn’t naturally fit in one film,” Garland said. “And there was a possibility— which we may not have the opportunity to do—but to do a proper trilogy. Not a sequence of sequels that are effectively replaying the first thing just in slightly different forms, but an actual true narrative. And we don’t know if we’ll be able to do it because that relates, in the end, to market forces. Films cost a lot of money. Even cheap films cost a lot of money. You know, people talk low-budget, but it’s a lot of money always. And so that depends on really whether people want to see future ones after we’ve made it.”
But, either way, 28 Years Later from Alex Garland and Danny Boyle is coming. And ultimately it’ll be coming… almost 28 years after the original too. No release date is set, but you have to guess 2025 or 2026, 23 or 24 years after the first film, is probably a good guess.
The trailers for Civil War, the latest film by Alex Garland, give the audience a very specific expectation of what they’re going to see. It looks like a film about a United States that is so divided politically, certain states have seceded and the country is at war. A scenario that’s, clearly, a fictionalized nightmare version of our present, where America’s Left and Right have turned to violence. And, in a way, Civil War is that. But it’s also not and that’s why it’s so damned fascinating and special.
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Written and directed by Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation), Civil War is, indeed, about a United States that’s no longer united. A United States at war with itself, hence the title. But one of the main combatants in this war is the Western Forces, a group comprised of California and Texas. Now, everyone knows California and Texas are maybe the two most polar opposite states in our current political climate. So that’s the first clue Civil War isn’t a by-the-book, pro-left, anti-right Hollywood tale. It has an agenda, for sure, and that agenda is certainly more inclusive than not, but Garland very specifically makes it clear that his America is not our America. Thereby, no matter who is watching the movie or what they believe, they can very easily enjoy the story without bias.
In other words, the movie is as objective as possible which, not coincidentally, is also the primary ideology of the film’s main characters: a group of journalists. Kirsten Dunst plays Lee, a famous war photographer traveling the country with a fellow journalist named Joel, played by Wagner Moura. After documenting a terrifying, but all too common, act of violence in New York, Lee and Joel decide to take a trip to Washington D.C. to attempt to interview the president, played by Nick Offerman. Colleague Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) thinks it’s a bad idea, but goes along for the ride anyway, and they also pick up Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), an aspiring photographer who sees Lee as a hero and mentor.
Spaney and Moura.Image: A24
And so the four journalists leave New York for D.C, which is usually an uneventful four or five-hour drive. In this world though, with everything happening across the country, it becomes a much longer, more arduous trip. Certain roads are blocked off. Other areas are not safe. And soon, the group realizes no matter which way they go, there is danger and terror at every turn.
Civil War is Alex Garland’s most mature movie to date. As he sets his characters off on this road trip, you can almost feel him not pushing the agenda one way or the other. An energy permeates the film, as if Garland wants to say something but is shaking and buzzing to hold it back. Much as the journalist heroes continue to preach objectivity and the importance of reporting the facts, no matter the circumstance, Garland too unfurls his narrative accordingly. Lee, Joel, and the crew approach each situation the same way: from a place of care and kindness. Sometimes that works, other times it doesn’t. Often, the most dangerous things we see aren’t in the center of the frame. A burning building here. A pile of bodies there. And while Joel and Lee’s distaste for the president certainly codes them as sympathetic to the WF, the film never really says what the WF stands for. We’re left to wonder, is it more Texas? Or more California?
That the film avoids ever defining the root of the conflict is one of the best things about the movie. Contrarily, one of the worst things is as the characters make the trek from New York to D.C. things can get a little repetitive. They drive, encounter an obstacle, learn something, and move on. Then they drive, encounter an obstacle, learn something, and move on again. The pattern repeats itself a few times and while each of those obstacles unfolds in a different, usually surprising way, some of the film’s momentum does falter following this structure.
Dunst and Spaeny. Image: A24
Where Civil War doesn’t falter is portraying intensity. Whenever the heroes encounter one of those obstacles, be it a booby-trapped gas station, hidden sniper, or a pink-sunglassed Jesse Plemons, the film’s tension always gets turned to 11. We are rarely sure what’s going to happen, and who is going to survive, primarily because of that objectivity. No one is treated like a hero or villain at the start. That changes scene to scene, of course, but the film, like the journalists, gives everyone an equal shot, which can be scary.
That can also make you question yourself, your biases, and more. Civil War is a film that challenges its audience to put themselves in the shoes of not just the main characters, but everyone. Partially that’s because everything in the movie seems so plausible that we see ourselves, our friends, and our neighbors in it. But it’s also because the performances are all so strong across the board that it’s easy to relate.
It feels like it’s been forever since we’ve seen Kirsten Dunst in a big, showy, starring role like this and watching Civil War, you have no idea why. Dunst gives a nuanced, powerful performance as Lee, a veteran so confident in herself that she’s almost carefree. That is until she meets Jessie. In Jessie, Lee sees a younger version of herself and it terrifies her. Lee knows Jessie, portrayed with lots of raw emotions by Spaeny, is dooming herself to danger. Choosing this life is probably the wrong thing for her. And so what should be a simple, mentor-mentee relationship is always strained. Lee sees too much of herself in Jessie, and Jessie doesn’t care.
Just another day. Image: A24
Their complex relationship, as well as the gravitas provided by Moura’s Joel and McKinley Henderson’s Sammy, come to a head in the film’s final act, which sees the team finally make it to Washington. Garland then unfurls a guttural, shocking, ground-level war in the heart of the nation’s capital, featuring views of national monuments and more that feel akin to 1996’s Independence Day. What happens in these scenes I won’t spoil, but it all builds to a final few minutes destined to be discussed and quoted for as long as movies exist. It’s that fantastic.
Ultimately, Civil War is a Rorschach test designed for maximum impact across political ideologies. You can watch it and view it however you’d like. Is not taking a side a bit of a cop-out? Should there have been a bit more of the story leaning left or right? I’d argue the fact it doesn’t have that is the authorship. Garland isn’t necessarily interested in changing anyone’s mind about anything. He wants any and everyone to consider themselves and what those differences could end up becoming. And hey, if playing it down the middle helps more people see it, that’s just a bonus.
If you were to make a list of people you’d expect to make a gritty, grounded, realistic, political thriller-slash-war movie, Alex Garland wouldn’t be on it. From his earliest work writing movies such as 28 Days Later and Sunshine to his directorial efforts such as Ex Machina and Annihilation, Garland has almost exclusively worked in sci-fi. So when his name pops up on a movie like Civil War, a cautionary action film about the political divide in the United States, it’s a bit of a head-scratcher. Garland gets that.
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“The reason I love sci-fi is because sci-fi has always permitted big ideas into it. It’s not embarrassed of big ideas,” Garland told io9 on video chat last week. “They exist in Forbidden Planet. They exist in Star Trek. There would be clear discussions or metaphors or literary analogies or whatever it happens to be. It was just allowed. And sci-fi audiences were kind of open-minded. They actually liked that… whereas if you did that in other genres, people would raise an eyebrow, like get a bit arch and a bit skeptical, in a sense… But [Civil War], if this was too sci-fi, it would reduce the texture of reality. And so it just didn’t feel appropriate. If I’d set it on a distant planet, yeah, it would have worked as an analogy, maybe, but it wouldn’t have the strength of the assertion.”
And so the sci-fi guy put that all aside and approached reality in his own, unique way. In Civil War, Garland presents a United States that is no longer united. The country has fractured into several different areas, many of which are now at war with one another. And while there is clearly DNA pulled from the current political climate, the film very specifically veers away from defining anything specifically. No one is right-wing, no one is left-wing, everyone just is, and that objectivity was not only a conscious choice in the writing, it echoes in his lead characters too.
Garland on set.Image: A24
“What I wanted the film to do was to function as a film in the same way as the reporters, which is just to show a sequence of events with a kind of studied neutrality,” he said. “Now, that doesn’t mean that it’s without bias, because a journalist reporting on something might have very strong feelings, and in fact, you could almost guarantee they would. So it’s just to do with how information is presented.”
Garland’s attempts at personifying and paying homage to objective, hard-nosed journalism even carried over to the choice of journalism depicted in the film. Though modern media is ruled by video, the main characters in Civil War are still photographers, a specific nod to the old-school way of doing things Garland wanted to pay tribute to.
“When you make a film, you try and make it work at different levels, and some of them are quite unconscious levels,” he said. “You hope it lands in an unconscious way but, in truth… [having the characters be photo journalists] reminds people of that old-fashioned form of photojournalism. Of that old-fashioned form of reporting when you had—in the 1960s and 1970s or whatever it was—these still photographers winding their camera. So it’s like a kind of trace memory.”
Photojournalism in full effect.Image: A24
Garland hopes when Civil War comes out, that it’ll be less of a trace memory for people and more of a gut shot. But he’s not exactly sure if that’ll happen. “It’s a dice roll,” he said. “You’re throwing this out into a polarized world where if you are not preaching to the choir that wants to be preached to, then they’ll get pissed off. Because that’s the counter. You want to hear your own biases reflected back at you.”
And from the guy who usually writes about running zombies, spaceships, AI, and alternate dimensions, it’s not doesn’t seem to be a reflection of him at all. Even though it is.
Civil War is in theaters Friday. We’ll have more from Garland later this week.
Alex Garland’s Civil Warisn’t shy about its premise. It’s right there in the title. It’s about a United States of America that’s no longer united, with various sections engaged in a civil war. But while many would assume it’s some kind of easy-to-understand red state, blue state thing, A24 has released an image that shows it’s anything but.
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Civil War is scheduled for release April 12. In it, Kirsten Dunst and Wagner Moura play journalists attempting to travel from New York to Washington, D.C. Along the way, they pick up a young, aspiring photo journalist played by Cailee Spaeny who is about to get a baptism of fire traveling through the country.
But what does the country these characters exist in look like? Over on social media, A24 released the below image to show exactly where the divisions are in the nation and, as you’ll see, there’s a lot to discuss.
The (not so) United States of Civil War.Image: A24
A few things jump out here. The first, of course, are the “Western Forces,” which include exactly one Western state—California—along with Texas. In reality, few states are as fundamentally different as California and Texas, but therein lies Garland’s point: Civil War isn’t about our 2024 reality. It’s an alternate version inspired by ours that comments on the potential consequences of our actions. And, it doesn’t really take a side or explain anything. Are the Western Forces more politically aligned with California or Texas? We never find out, and that’s the point.
This map also doesn’t make it clear who are the good guys and bad guys in the movie. Which, again, is the point. Who are the Loyalist States loyal to? Why is the Northwest a “New People?” And the Florida Alliance… well, that one actually kind of makes sense.
Having seen Civil War I can reveal that not all of these questions are answered, but seeing this map and thinking about it will begin to prepare you for the unexpected nature of the film. Tickets are on sale now.
