"Civil War" and the two Alex Garlands
Looking back at one director’s cinematic split personality
Civil War is the fourth film directed by Alex Garland, and his eighth produced feature screenplay. I’m writing about the movie this weekend for The Ankler, exploring how it fits into Hollywood’s anxiety around portraying our current political climate. The piece runs on Saturday. I hope you like it.
Seeing Civil War made me think a lot about its creator. His portrait of a divided country captures the two halves of his artistic personality. Picture twin Alex Garlands: the shock-tactic entertainer, the cerebral philosopher. One busts heads, the other quotes Yeats. I only really like one of them. No question, the output is influential. Garland’s script for 2003’s 28 Days Later defined a zombie resurgence and an apocalypse vogue. His directorial debut, 2014’s Ex Machina, announced him as a visual stylist crafting bleeding-edge techno-nightmares. (It also helped brand-build its distributor, A24, into the much-adored studio now releasing Civil War.)
2018’s Annihilation, 2020’s TV series Devs, and 2022’s Men followed. You sense a mood. Garland’s pictures are dark and haunted, nasty and seeking. In shiny computer meditations or naturalist body horrors, a Garland protagonist looks in slow motion at something terribly gorgeous. Then necks snap.
Must admit, I think everything past Ex Machina is a letdown. Annihilation stars a promising ensemble, yet only one character (Gina Rodriguez’ paranoid paramedic) has a pulse. You could enjoy that film’s vibe cruise, but Devs was eight endless episodes of languid Peak TV rubbish. In suggesting that a tech CEO with a tragic backstory could engineer a celestial device, Garland actually sanctified the industry’s self-adoration. (Elon Musk would tweet “YES!” at the mansplaining-as-godsplaining final scene.) The show was also boring as hell, which sums up the first 80 minutes of Men.
That limp allegory — a woman eats an apple off a tree — does end on a memorably outlandish gross-out effect. I trust Garland with bleak comedy. So I prefer his earlier work. 28 Days Later falls off towards the end, and gets praised more for Danny Boyle’s run-and-gun direction. Still, Garland’s brisk script brought charm and humanity to the undead genre. He reunited with Boyle for 2007’s Sunshine, a flop always threatening to become a cult classic. I like it without loving it, but the characters have a quirky charm. (What a cast: Michelle Yeoh, Chris Evans, Cillian Murphy, Benedict Wong, Rose Byrne, Hiroyuki Sanada, Cliff Curtis!)
Sunshine takes an infamous dive. For most of its runtime, it’s Hard Science-Fiction, tracking one team’s suicide mission to reignite the sun. Then a crazy man kills people with a knife. The shift from dreamy odyssey to space slasher previews Garland’s larger rift, I think. Obviously, thought-provoking ambience can be as good or bad as lizard-brain pulp. That said, I just don’t think Garland’s got the chops to be Tarkovsky. No one who loves Annihilation has ever convinced me the bear doesn’t look stupid, or that there’s a real reason why Tessa Thompson decides to become a plant. In Devs, characters drone on about concepts a Marvel comic could easily explain in two panels.
Ex Machina is still the best fusion of its maker’s instincts, hiding one kind of story inside another. Oscar Isaac plays a tech CEO welcoming employee Domhnall Gleeson to his fancy pad. The rich man has created an artificially intelligent robot, played by Alicia Vikander. It’s a riveting modern fable: Creator and Created, He and She. But it reveals itself as a tense thriller full of double-crosses and vengeance.
Civil War rediscovers some of that cynical tartness. There’s no mysterious cosmic thing, just a landscape of ruin. Like 28 Days Later, Sunshine, and Annihilation, it’s another squad quest, following journalists on a road trip from New York to DC. Individual stops contain hard-edged humor, deadpan horror, or both. The worst scenes are people staring at bright lights while cool music plays. Kirsten Dunst is good as a warzone photographer with an existential struggle. I wish another character didn’t literally tell her, “It’s existential.”
Civil War left me yearning for Garland’s hidden gem, an action film with no pretension beyond gutterblood thrills. Dredd 3D was 2012’s also-ran. Cinephiles seeking a building-fight killfest preferred The Raid: Redemption. The Hunger Games was a bigger dystopian phenomenon. It was a rare flop comic book adaptation in the summer of The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, and The Amazing Spider-Man. It’s a treat, truly, packing hard-R gaudy delights into a 95-minute runtime. Filmed with 3D cameras, it also looked better in the extra dimension than a whole miserable blockbuster wave of post-production conversions. (You won’t get the 3D at home, but it’s streaming on Peacock now.)
Pete Travis directed, though various reports (and star Karl Urban) claim writer-producer Garland was the author. Certainly, it’s the fullest expression of his B-movie sensibility. Urban’s titular lawman takes rookie Cassandra (Olivia Thirlby) on a call to a 200-story housing project ruled by a criminal empress (Lena Headey). Garland dabbled in video game writing, and this is a sidescroller-simple plot, advancing up levels to a final fight.
Fair to complain that the cheap thrills avoid the comic’s fascist satire, but sorrowful meaning hides beneath the glittery brutality. When the Judges flee to a skateboard park high above the ground, Cassandra stares out at the impossibly huge city. Millions of people surround her; no one can help. The metropolis is Mega City One, “stretching from Boston to Washington D.C.” That’s the same region Civil War drives through, and you could argue this is another post-apocalypse, with citizens huddling behind walls to avoid the irradiated countryside.
But I actually think Judge Dredd’s future America is specifically not apocalyptic. Rather, it’s locked in a state of permanent managed collapse. 800 million people live in the “unbroken concrete landscape,” so the population has more than doubled with less landmass. This indifferent society could survive forever, with more people living much worse. Civil War portrays the real fear our nation will fall apart. Dredd 3D worries it won’t.