Alex Garland’s CIVIL WAR Screens At SXSW – Reactions And Reviews

By Michelle McCue | March 17, 2024

Having it’s World Premiere at SXSW on March 14 was Alex Garland’s CIVIL WAR.

The Hollywood Reporter says, “The audience reaction to the film has been very effusive, with viewers calling it a riveting, disturbing, masterful piece of filmmaking (read the audience and critic first reactions).”

The consensus of many of the reviews out of the film festival in Austin say the film is brilliant:

“With the precision and length of its violent battle sequences, it’s clear Civil War operates as a clarion call. Garland wrote the film in 2020 as he watched cogs on America’s self-mythologizing exceptionalist machine turn, propelling the nation into a nightmare. With this latest film, he sounds the alarm, wondering less about how a country walks blindly into its own destruction and more about what happens when it does,” says Lovia Gyarkye in her review over at The Hollywood Reporter.

“Alex Garland’s “CIVIL WAR” is an absolute ________ MASTERPIECE. A riveting, unflinching, visceral cautionary tale that’s scary as hell. Watching it, one can’t help but feel how close we are to this actually happening, making it a MUST SEE to stop it before it actually does,” wrote Scott Mantz.”

“How utterly bizarre, you might think. And in the abstract, it is bizarre. But “Civil War” is a furiously convincing and disturbing thing when you’re watching it. It’s a great movie that has its own life force. It’s not like anything Garland has made. It’s not like anything anyone has made, even though it contains echoes of dozens of other films (and novels) that appear to have fed the filmmaker’s imagination,” says Matt Zoller Seitz of Rogerebert.com.

It sits at 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes.

The THR article goes onto say that the day after the film’s world premiere screening, the Ex Machina and Annihilation filmmaker broke his silence at the SXSW panel on the comparisons to the film and today’s politics.

“America’s divisions are echoed almost precisely in many countries around the world,” the British filmmaker said. “In the case of America, there’s an extra danger given its power and importance in the world. America has an internal concept in its exceptionalism that means it feels it’s immune to some kinds of problems. One of the things history shows us is that nobody is immune. Nobody is exceptional. And if we don’t apply rationality and decency and thoughtfulness to these problems, in any place, it can get out of control … I’m not trying to locate [these problems] to America, that would be factually wrong. I can take you back home [to Britain] and can show you the same stuff happening in my country. But the implications here are much greater.”

Before seeing the film on April 12, two must-see films that covers the same topic are:

• BUSHWICK (2017), starring Dave Bautista and Brittany Snow, “as the unlikely pair who navigate through a hail of gunfire and lethal explosions and learn they are in the middle of a civil war as Texas attempts to secede from the US.” (trailer).
• LEAVE THE WORLD BEHIND (Netflix) starring Julia Roberts, Mahershala Ali, Ethan Hawke, Myha’la and Kevin Bacon effectively shows the U.S. as a country being disabed by an unknown enemy in a three-stage campaign resulting in a coup d’état, accompanied be a foreboding score from composer Mac Quayle.

CIVIL WAR official synopsis: From filmmaker Alex Garland comes a journey across a dystopian future America, following a team of military-embedded journalists as they race against time to reach DC before rebel factions descend upon the White House.

Rogerebert.com review: Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, and Stephen McKinley Henderson drive to Washington, D.C. in hopes of interviewing the president (Nick Offerman) before he surrenders to the military forces of something called the WA, or Western Alliance. The WA consists of militias from California and Texas (with secondary support from Florida, which is apparently a different separatist group that shares the WA’s values).”

The CIVIL WAR score is by Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow.