What the heck is going on in Alex Garland’s Civil War trailer?

They say don’t judge a book by its cover, but the point of a trailer is to help us judge movies and whether they’re worth seeing, right? That being the case, it feels fair to say that Alex Garland’s Civil War, premiering April 26, 2024, looks absolutely ridiculous. The new trailer takes on that classic premise—“What if near-future America was a dystopia?”—and adds in the uneasy language of, well, civil war. Nineteen states have seceded, guys, and the rebel “Western Forces” are going to reach the White House by the Fourth of July!!!

Cailee Spaeny and Jacob Elordi talk “Priscilla”

Look, it brings us no pleasure to report that this looks incredibly dumb, because Garland has assembled a stellar cast, including Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny, Wagner Moura, and Stephen McKinley Henderson as a roving band of journalists. Nick Offerman is a suspicious third-term president. Jesse Plemons wields a machine gun while wearing tacky red plastic sunglasses. On paper, all of that sounds really good! In practice, it looks like a total mess. The “Western Forces,” for example, are for some reason an alliance between California and Texas. (Apropos of nothing, Garland, who penned this piece of American political commentary, is British.)

Civil War | Official Trailer HD | A24

To make matters worse, the dialogue in the trailer has all the subtlety of an air strike dropped on the heads of American citizens. Moura’s character condescendingly asks a shopkeeper if she’s “aware there’s like, a pretty huge civil war going on all across America?” To which she replies that they “just try to stay out.” When the journalists try to tell the gun-toting Plemons that they’re American, he responds, “Okay, what kind of American are you?” A mournful Dunst at one point intones, “Every time I survived a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning home: don’t do this.” Towards the end, Offerman recites the Pledge of Allegiance, emphasis on the indivisible (because, as the Florida Alliance will surely tell you, there’s some pretty serious division going on!). Then there’s the bold tagline: “ALL EMPIRES FALL.” We get it, already!

Garland has earned a lot of goodwill with previous features Ex Machina and Annihilation (Men, humorously left off Civil War’s promotional materials, nevertheless has its defenders), as well as writing the screenplays for films like 28 Days Later and Never Let Me Go. Similarly, A24 is the indie darling studio everybody loves. It’s puzzling, then, that this combination has produced a film (or at least a trailer) that looks like a lesser sequel to Olympus Has Fallen or The Purge. Regardless, curiosity as to what the heck is going on in Civil War may yet drive audiences to the theater, if only to answer the question of in what alternate universe would California and Texas ever be teaming up?