Ace of Spades Headlines

A reviewer from Tablet calls Civil War a "good movie" with "stupid politics"
The film relies on a mostly unexplained premise that a future third-term U.S. president has dissolved the FBI, turning the United States into an authoritarian state. Garland doesn't beat the audience over the head with his intentions or his politics. However, in his press tour for the film--including an advance NYC screening earlier this week I attended--he revealed that he felt no need to explain why the country broke apart. "Everyone knows," he says. Indeed, we do.

Without making it explicit in the film, Garland clearly wishes to make an allusion not just to the orange man--and his all-too-familiar badness--but the much-lamented rise of "dangerous populism" across the West. Garland is subtle in how he takes sides, but he clearly aligns with the elitist interpretation of rising mass dissatisfaction as driven by the bad behavior of deplorables and their ignorant love of "disinformation."