‘Civil War’ review: This movie is more about the war than America

you might think it’s a new movie civil war This is a warning of deepening political divisions in America. The film’s trailer certainly suggests so, and director Alex Garland seemed to confirm that was his intention in a recent interview with The Atlantic.

As a writer who wrote a book about the decline of democracy, this marketing was a big wake-up call for me.

Although the United States faces very real threats of extreme polarization and increased political violence, a modern repeat of the Civil War is essentially out of the question (especially movie version, a rebel alliance led by Texas and California confronts the federal government). Attempting to use such wars to examine how America’s polarization undermines democracy will almost certainly fail.

Thankfully, civil war is not the movie I was led to believe. The film begins near the end of the conflict and provides little context as to how things went sour in the fictional America. There are hints here and there, such as that the president (Nick Offerman) disbanded the FBI in his third term, but nothing seems to help viewers understand why the United States descended into bloody disaster. Nor. Despite the marketing and perhaps the director’s intentions, civil war It says virtually nothing about real-world American politics.

However, this does not mean that the film is a failure; it is far from a failure.Once you understand that civil war It’s a searing meditation on what happens when political order collapses and violence takes on a sinister logic of its own.

In doing so, we are able to derive some of the best contemporary academic research on violence in civil wars.

This is your brain about violence.

civil war The film follows a group of four reporters as they rush from the (relative) safety of New York City to Washington, D.C., to cover the fall of the president. Combined forces from California and Texas are knocking on the Capitol’s doorstep.

But this story has no real sense of place or specificity. The towns and cities they pass through have no names, except for a rebel base outside Charlottesville. The acts of violence that reporters witness on the streets are horrific—we’re talking mass graves, suicide bombings, torture—but they generally have clear political motives or higher-order objectives. Not that there is.

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In one scene, a sniper fires on a reporter’s car, forcing them to take shelter next to two soldiers who are also attacked. When reporters asked the soldiers which side they were all on, they scoffed and explained that he was trying to kill them and that was what mattered.

This scene reveals what this movie is really about. It reveals not how a political order collapses into civil war, but what happens to a society after it collapses.

civil war It presents a story in which war takes on a logic of its own. The need to survive forces some people to do things they wouldn’t otherwise consider doing. The breakdown of order creates opportunities for some people to act on their worst impulses. The best dramatization is the haunting scene in which a bigoted soldier (Jesse Plemons) brutally interrogates the protagonists at gunpoint.

In such situations, social trust completely collapses. Faith in both the organization and other people cannot survive.

civil war‘s journalistic treatment basically falls into this theme. The film’s reporters, led by steely photojournalist Lee (a wonderful Kirsten Dunst), are generally decent people and good professionals. But in a world where no one trusts anyone, there are no truly neutral institutions like journalism. With no legal system or supreme authority to appeal to, they are at the mercy of any armed group they encounter. Most of them don’t trust journalists any more than anyone else.

In situations of social collapse, violence consumes everything that makes society work.

What the fake civil war tells us about the real civil war

civil warLooking at the grim vision of , I was reminded more than anything of an academic book that said: The logic of violence in civil wars Written by Oxford Professor Stathis Kalivas.

A classic of modern literature on civil wars, this book argues that most people overestimate the extent to which patterns of violence in civil wars are driven by runaway ideology and emotion. Rather, Kalivas argues that individual decisions are often based on rational self-interest calculations that begin with survival.

Kalivas’s treatment of the relationship between violence and civilian behavior is particularly noteworthy.

As the American experience in Iraq and Afghanistan shows, gaining the support of local civilians is critical to determining who wins in a civil war. Based on data from the Greek Civil War in the 1940s, Kalyvas argues that civilians make decisions about cooperation based primarily on their perceptions of who controls the territory in which they live. Essentially, they are most likely to cooperate when they believe the other side has the power to protect their safety and promote other interests.

Civilian cooperation shapes how combatants use force, as informants tell combatants where the enemy is hiding and which civilians support the enemy side. How combatants act on this information shapes the views of civilians and influences future decisions about whether to cooperate. In Kalyvas’s words, violence is a “collaborative process.” Who lives and who dies is determined by the interaction of civilian and combatant actions, all of which are rooted in the perception of rational self-interest.

This is basically how the world works civil war It works. The characters make choices about how best to advance their interests in a country defined not by ideology or partisanship but by who is trying to kill them and who isn’t. I can’t recall a single occasion where anyone made any ideological statements about the nature of the American Civil War or why we were fighting it.

Movies like this have little to say about modern American politics. But the footage and location may make it easier for American viewers to understand the nuanced story that’s actually being told: how life can become hell for people caught up in a real-life civil war. It may help you.

This is a film less about political polarization and headline-grabbing wars in Gaza and Ukraine than it is about the long and bloody counterinsurgency wars that defined the War on Terror era.

From that perspective, civil war We need Americans to think less about our own contemporary problems and more about the suffering we have recently caused others.

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