[Cinéma] “Civil War”, America transformed into a war zone

The shock film “Civil War”, in theaters this Wednesday, is alarmed by a collapse of public order in the United States, a few months before the presidential election.

With its poster in the form of a nod to Apocalypse Now (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979), reddening sun on the horizon and combat helicopter, the Civil War project is ambitious: to describe with the greatest possible realism the chaos and savagery that would threaten the United States in the short term. Far from Vietnam, hell takes as its setting Washington and the rest of a country in flames and blood, faced in the near future with the secession of California and Texas. Violence and weapons are everywhere, daily attacks, while the president with fascist overtones is holed up in a White House that looks like a green zone. The FBI has been dismantled and military drones are attacking American civilians.

Directed by British director Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation, Men, the Devs series), this big-budget independent film focuses the plot on a small group of four war journalists. Among them, a renowned photographer (Kirsten Dunst) who takes under her wing a young hothead (Cailee Spaeny, revealed by Priscilla, by Sofia Coppola). Steeped in ideals, these reporters brave all dangers to hope to reach the White House and obtain an interview with the President of the United States. The sources of the conflict, or the ideology at work, are knowingly omitted by Alex Garland. The action is also centered on the daily life of the inhabitants which has descended into horror.

We don’t need to be explicit. We know exactly how this could happen

Just over six months before a tense election, the film resonates with the concerns of American citizens. And sounds like a warning in the mind of its director. The film’s “three-term president” allows us to draw a parallel with the fear that many Americans have in the event of Donald Trump’s re-election. They fear that the Republican billionaire will refuse to comply with the Constitution which limits the number of presidential terms to two and to leave power after four years. A not so improbable scenario “if you take him at his word,” assures William Howell, professor of political science at the University of Chicago. “And I think we would be wrong” not to believe it. However, “I don’t think we are on the verge of a civil war,” he adds, citing instead “the erosion of state powers, the sabotage of administrations and the disaffection of the general public” as reasons for this polarization.

In the United States, some criticized the release of the film in the middle of the election campaign, fearing that it would add fuel to the fire. The director felt that Civil War should allow us to discuss the division of society and populism. And that its raw and realistic violence aims to inoculate spectators against war. “We don’t need to be explicit. We know exactly how that could happen,” Alex Garland said at the film’s premiere in Austin, Texas.

Canadian novelist Stephen Marche believes that the United States is “a textbook case of a country heading straight for civil war.” In his book The Next Civil War, he uses political science models to put forward five scenarios that could trigger a large-scale armed conflict in the United States: militias hostile to the state confront federal forces, a president is assassinated… For some, political violence “becomes acceptable and in a certain sense, inevitable” because they “do not think their government is legitimate,” the writer asserts. In a survey conducted in 2023 by the Brookings Institutes and PRRI, 23% of Americans surveyed believed that “true American patriots might be forced to resort to violence to save (their) country.”