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Why I Wasn’t Scared by ‘Civil War’


"Civil War" is a combat spectacle so abstract, wrapped around a road movie so meandering, that I watched it without a twinge of anxiety.

And recently, I saw a film that did honestly scare me: the superb documentary “Bad Faith: Christian Nationalism’s Unholy War on Democracy,” which anatomizes what’s going on behind the scenes of the powerful movement to turn America into a theocracy, one that Trump is now aligned with. By making the jumping-off point for his movie the fact that Texas and California have both seceded from the nation, and are now somehow united in their rebellion, Garland is telling us not to read “Civil War” as an overly easy allegory. And if the movie is such fanciful political sci-fi, then why have the rebellion be against an all-too-obvious and flatly drawn Donald Trump stand-in (played by Nick Offerman) who feels like one of those presidential knockoff characters in a countdown-to-Armageddon thriller?

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