“Civil War”: A warning about violence, not partisanship
“Civil War”: A warning about violence, not partisanship
The new A24 movie Civil War is set in a perhaps not so far distant dystopian future, in which some states have seceded and then joined together to battle a U.S. government that won’t let them go. The film is seen through the eyes of a group of roving war reporters led by Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), who has seen these horrors before around the world, just not in her home country.
Her team’s mission: to capture the chaos on their bloody journey to Washington, D.C., to interview the president of the United States.
If you saw only the trailer of Civil War, though, you might get a false idea of the film. Its first impression, particularly for those on the right, brings to mind the trailer for the 2020 satirical action horror movie The Hunt, which showed sportsman elites literally hunting down MAGA-loving “deplorables.” But if you ignored the trailer and saw the film, as I did, it mocked progressives as much if not more than it did conservatives. It was a political movie, but it wasn’t picking sides, per se. National Review’s Kyle Smith even called it a “pro-Trump movie.”