A24's Civil War

In 2024, the movie Civil War was released, written and directed by Alex Garland and distributed by A24. It's set in the midst of a near future civil war in the United States.

There isn't much backstory on how the war started or its exact outlines. You learn that there are secessionists who oppose the sitting President, who apparently has made a power grab and overreached. He appears briefly in two different scenes and seems to be modeled after a certain unpopular recent President. The primary opposition is the Western Forces, which include Texas and California, and has enough resources to muster a formidable army. How Texas and California came to be willing to work together is not explained.

I found this map online. It's not from the movie, and in fact I'm not sure if it has any official blessing from A24 or Alex Garland. I stole it from a tweet I found but for all I know the original poster is making it up. I include it to have a map to show on this page. It has some interesting choices, like South Carolina remaining loyalist instead of aligning with other Southern states. Who knows what they were thinking. It's another interesting way to speculate how the U.S.A. might break up.

Civil War is a great movie (I thought) but it's not a political thriller or alternate history story so much as a study of war on the ground from the perspective of photojournalists. Those are the main characters and the story follows them as they travel through the wartime East Coast.They encounter various militias and armed groups and it's often not clear who is on what side, or exactly what is going on. The cinematography is amazing, and the mood varies from eerily apprehensive to terrifyingly tense to action-packed war violence.

As a movie about the experience of war on the ground, it reminded me of the comic series DMZ, also set during another version of a Second American Civil War, and also about a journalist in the mix of it, navigating in a dangerous environment and encountering other people surviving during a war. Both of these stories invite their audience to consider what it would be like for Americans to experience the political collapse and devastating warfare that they have become used to seeing happen only in far away places, such as Iraq, Syria, Ukraine...the list goes on.

Could a civil war really happen here? That's the open question that these "breakup scenario" pages are asking. During and after the groundshaking 2016 election, I speculated on how a values consensus might be emerging. But with all that's happened since, it seems the partisan divide remains strong and the Culture Wars rage on. As of this writing in the summer of 2024, the question remains open.

This page copyright Steve Barrera 2024