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MOVIE FEATURE

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a kind of terrible savagery.” The dark genius of Garland’s film is in his radical repurposing of the images, tools, and euphemisms of modern war - airstrikes, civilian targets, collateral damage - onto American soil. “That is any nation that gets into conflict, whether it's civil war or war with a neighbour - that’s just what war is now,” he says. “If you are letting something slide towards that state, just be aware that's what the state looks like. The famous phrase, 'if you forget history, you're doomed to repeat it' - it's important to understand that nobody is

immune. No country is immune from that. Because it’s nothing to do with countries, it’s to do with people,” warns the director. Cast as veteran reporter Joel, Narcos actor Wagner Moura agrees. “When I was reading the script, it created a cognitive disruption in my mind,” he says. “Images that we are used to seeing far away and on TV, taking place in the United States - it’s crazy, it’s scary.” Despite the film’s title, Garland doesn’t see much similarity with America’s original Civil War 160 years ago. “This is not a repetition of the previous civil war,” he says. “I don't think America or the rest of the world is in danger of the clear demarcations of the previous civil war. That's not the risk the world faces. We are facing a disintegration risk,” argues the British filmmaker who, from a distance, observes the current dangerous instability of the US. “America is so powerful that the rest of the world follows its politics and its elections because they know they will be affected by the outcome,” he explains. “Countries will have huge sea changes of fortune based on all sorts of different factors, based on American politics.” Despite its intentionally unspecified origin story, the civil war in the film can be traced to a lost thread around the very idea of America - the disintegration of a nation once bound by common history and a shared set of principles. “What kind of American are you?” asks an

Set in the near future, Civil War sees a team of journalists travel across the United States during the rapidly escalating Second American Civil War, which has engulfed the entire nation. Words Gill Pringle T he film was written and directed by British author Alex Garland, who has a knack for unsettling his audiences with

themes close to home, as he did with his directorial debut Ex Machina ten years ago. Civil War documents a group of journalists - including photographers Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny - struggling to survive under the dystopian dictatorship government, where partisan extremist militias regularly commit war crimes. Just days away from the Capitol’s surrender, Dunst’s Lee sets out to the White House in the

Kirsten Dunst

In this America - where the fabric of society has been torn apart - there is only the individual and their relentless drive to survive. “People talk about ‘collateral damage’ in war - if

hope of getting the final interview with Nick Offerman’s president. “This movie feels like a

unnamed soldier, played by Dunst’s real-life husband Jesse Plemons, in arguably

Before becoming a filmmaker, Alex Garland was a best-selling author, whose debut novel The Beach was adapted into the hit movie starring Leonardo DiCaprio. DYK?

you are fighting a war in a built-up area, civilians

cautionary fable of what happens when people don’t communicate with each other,” says Dunst, ”When nobody listens to each other, when you silence journalists, when we lose a shared truth.”

the film’s most memorable and distressing scene. confronts our most divisive instincts, but it’s also one that everyone, on both It’s a question that

will get killed,” says Garland. “You often hear generals talking in those terms in a sort of factual way, which is objectively correct. It is also true that you get, on a more domestic scale,

• Civil War is out Jul 10

Civil War boldly imagines the human consequences of losing this shared idea of a nation.

sides of the war, is unable to answer.

28 JULY 2024

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