FIRST REFLECTIONS ON “CIVIL WAR” (2024): THE MOVIE

Just got home a bit ago after viewing the dystopian film written and directed by ALEX GARLAND. It basically follows a team of journalists traveling across the Eastern part of the United States during a Second American Civil War which has engulfed the entire nation. Stars Kirsten Dunst as the lead protagonist and runs 94 minutes, start to finish.

EIGHT INITIAL IMPRESSIONS. I haven’t had enough time to fully process the movie, but I tell you it left me with a low-level, numbing buzz that is still with me. So let me get right to the First Impressions I had during and after viewing the film.

1. EMPTY THEATER. I attended the Sunday, 4 pm showing, and was surprised to find only 4-5 people in the audience. I immediately had the thought: America is ignoring this movie, just as the Church is ignoring all its warning signs taking place just outside its doors and windows. The Nation is asleep, while just below us is a seething cauldron about to explode.

• THE PACE. Started with a rather perfunctory open with the President of the United States warming up his faux encouragement that the government was just about to win the war. The movie would end with a stunning contradiction of that speech’s promises to the people. Not unlike all the current reassurances we hear from either Party that are as false as George Washington’s teeth, that I believe will end just as terribly.

• MUSICAL SCORE. The music composed for this film by BEN SALISBURY AND GEOFF BARROW is as haunting and at times, nearly hilariously contradictory as former films of this genre. I expect to artistically depict the drama’s surreal insanity of experiencing the greatest nation on the earth increasingly appearing alike any other Third World country, fully detonated far outside the confines of its previous, comparatively orderly, pristine Constitutional Frames.

• GRADUALIZED INTENSITY. I noticed that the early half of the film, albeit accompanied by some early, J6 like insurrectionist scenes and standard dialogue was almost generic. I remember thinking to myself: “Oh boy, this is going to be all hat and no cattle,” as we sometimes say it out West. But that too I think was a deliberate strategy to build toward the movie’s rather stunning second half. By the time we see the scene where the Insurrectionist chillingly asks the journalists, “What kind of American are you,” we are thrust into the bone and marrow of the film’s overwhelming brute force of American against American.

• GOOD GUYS OR BAD GUYS? It was often difficult to tell who to root for in this story, but again I am sure that too was intentional, since in the final analysis there were to be no winners here – only brutal chaos, carnage, the inhumanity of a war without boundaries, with death depicted up close and graphic. On reflection, almost all the combatants were wearing some sort of uniform, adding to the strategic confusion of the storyline.

• REGRESSIVE PREDICTION. In graduate school I was introduced to a powerful statistic called Regression Coefficient Analysis that would essentially plot a starting point of some trend or phenomenon, trace its middle stages and then accurately predict a Final Outcome of some sort. I see that in this film by brilliantly telling the audience that, given current conditions and escalatory patterns, we are headed for The Unthinkable: The violent destruction of the United States of America from within.

• POWERFUL COMPOSITE. As I was drawn into the movie’s mind-numbing last war scenes accompanied by the eerily composed musical score, I was reminded of three previous dystopian films: Apocalypse Now (1979) by Francis Ford Coppola; The Road (2009), a dramatization of Cormac McCarthy’s brilliant novel of the same name; and The Book of Eli (2010) starring Denzel Washington who walks across a Wasteland America with a Bible for its preservation. Each film also employed haunting camera work, minor key musical scores and unnerving, explosive scenes.

• MY RECOMMENDATION. This is clearly not your family friendly movie by any stretch, though I somewhat cynically had the thought to make it required viewing for every White Evangelical Pastor in America! That, to shake them, and I mean shake them from their collective Intellectual and Spiritual Lethargy while pretending that these things could never occur in America. I also thought I could not commend the film to most of our Fellowship because of its foul language and brutal warfare scenes. But my last reflection was this:

If we cannot sit through a theatrical depiction of what is very likely coming to our nation, what will we do when it is actually here, beloved?

JEREMIAH 12:5 (AMPC). “If you have raced with men on foot and they have tired you out, then how can you compete with horses? And if [you take to flight] in a land of peace where you feel secure, then what will you do [when you tread the tangled maze of jungle haunted by lions] in the swelling and flooding of the Jordan?”

A great deal to think and pray about my friends. And to prepare for, should we continue down this very Dark Road. Selah.