Why Garland won't publicly commit to the what I feel is the obvious imagery and characterization, I don't know. But I feel getting bogged down in the details of policy is less important than the message that it's trying to convey. It's merely a storytelling decision -- not hidden endorsement of Trumpism or fascism.
But he *has* commented on it and I don't think we can invoke Death of the Author here. No film is ever made in a vacuum - it's always a sign of the times and a sign of where its filmmakers are at the time, and Garland deliberately wrote this movie as a reaction to what he was seeing as intense polarization in the United States, specifically, in 2020.
I gather that the movie is extraordinary on a technical level - visuals, sound - and is overall a harrowing experience of some kind of war, but Garland has always been a master at creating that sort of tension and fear and encroaching, confusing menace. That was never going to be beyond any doubt.
The problem as it were is Garland is to some extent trying to have his cake and eat it too, deliberately and provocatively titling a war film "Civil War" and setting it in the United States - written in a context where dropping and smashing Confederate statues into the ocean became a major national discussion, where people did and still believe in a Lost Cause appraisal of that war (that people in the United States simply call "the civil war"), pseudo-historical nonsense which argues at its less extremes both the Union and Confederates had moral justification.
Look at the Robbie Collin review:
It wouldn't be fair to describe Alex Garland's new film as Apocalypse Now for centrists – even though for some of us, that sounds like the movie of the year. But it certainly is a hotly topical heart-of-darkness journey in which the darkness's political origins and aims are virtually beside the point.
Though it might be about total societal disintegration in a very near-future version of the United States of America, Civil War is neither an anti-Trump exemplum nor an anti-woke one. And that lack of a clear-cut message is liable to cheese off all the right people (not to mention the left ones). But Garland, the writer and director of Ex Machina, Annihilation and Men, is defiantly uninterested here in taking a side. Rather, his film is about the business of side-taking itself, and where our growing mania for doing so ultimately leads.
That's what a film like this threatens to do, create a bizarre justification for both "sides" being at opposite extremes when being "anti-Trump" is really being anti-fascist and being "anti-woke" is being a hateful piece of shit. No, the two aren't equivalent versions of the same thing, though it certainly all sounds like at least one centrist's wet dream. Sometimes taking a staunch side really is the proper thing to do, and thinking otherwise is how we've had so many people equivocating over what's happening in Israel and Palestine.
I have a fundamental problem with the entire premise behind this film and most notably Garland's apparent governing principles for making it, which I absolutely don't think can be divorced from the final product. I have absolutely no doubt that it's a spectacular kinetic experience, particularly in a booming theater.
