Controversy smothering creativity: Why ‘Civil War’ is the right movie at the wrong time for A24
Even though the company was only founded in August 2012, A24 has already become synonymous with top-tier storytelling after developing its reputation by handing talented filmmakers the platform with which to tell their own stories unburdened from the usual studio politics. Alex Garland’s Civil War is a milestone moment for the production house, but that’s being lost among the growing controversy.
A24 has prioritised artistically driven, creatively unshackled, and distinctly unique features from rising filmmakers and established names alike, to the point seeing the logo attached to any trailer or poster is more than enough to convince great swathes of the cinemagoing public that the film in question is well worth checking out.
Hereditary, The Killing of a Sacred Deer, Under the Skin, The Witch, Lady Bird, Ex Machina, Moonlight, The Zone of Interest, and Everything Everywhere All at Once are just some of the most notable A24-backed movies, which have all won widespread praise and made an impact on awards season. However, none of them come carrying the same pressure as Civil War.
Garland’s dystopian thriller carries a production budget of $50million, making it the most expensive A24 original by quite some distance. Fortunately, early tracking numbers have indicated that it’s on course to secure the distributor’s highest-grossing opening weekend ever in the United States, but the timing of its release isn’t ideal.
While it’s not exactly a coincidence that a near-future story unfolding in an America caught up in the middle of its second civil war is releasing in the same year as a presidential election, the discourse surrounding Garland’s latest – and potentially penultimate – outing as a director has inevitably been dominated by Trump/Biden 2: Electric Boogaloo.
It’s a cautionary tale, without a doubt, and one that’s both indicative and reflective of many socio-political ideologies that have created an ever-widening gulf between both sides of the divide. And yet, because Garland is a British filmmaker, he intentionally chose to obfuscate the reasons why the central conflict at the heart of the narrative ignited in the first place.
“Many civil wars are a factional disintegration, like in Syria or Yugoslavia. I was interested in that kind,” he told Dazed for why his Civil War isn’t about any issue specifically. Even though he’d written the script before the January 6th riots, he admitted he “could detect it around the set” when certain sequences were being shot, conceding that perhaps his fictional film suddenly “felt less speculative”.
American politics being what it is, though, the battle lines have already been drawn. Many are simply refusing to examine Civil War as a standalone work of cinema, with analysis and interpretations instead being filtered through the personal belief system of the person offering their assessment. That means two views on the end product are going to become dominant above all others, and ignoring the middle ground has the potential to reduce what should be a ground-breaking moment for A24 into yet another soundbite or bullet point to be weaponized in order to peddle an agenda that’s got nothing to do with cinema at all.
There’s even the obligatory conspiracy theory claiming Civil War is a blatant example of ‘predictive programming’, a method deployed by the Hollywood elites to condition the audience to fall in line with the views being espoused on-screen. Never mind the fact it was written and directed by a guy from London who started out as a novelist, the content guaranteed that there were going to be people reading between lines that don’t even exist.
It was always a risky proposition for Civil War to arrive in cinemas on the cusp of a rematch between two pensioners who’d already split the nation in twain four years previously, but when the widely-acclaimed movie should be gaining notice for marking A24’s maiden foray into blockbusters and setting new benchmarks at the box office to indicate the company is more than capable of gaining a seat at the big budget table, its lasting legacy could be that of being co-opted as a political tool.
