The Broken Civilizations of Alex Garland

The chatter around the politics of 'Civil War' misses a career-long obsession with the making and unmaking of societies.

Before Alex Garland’s new film Civil War even made it to theaters—and certainly now, as it’s been released to an avalanche of discourse—political questions have surrounded this election-year thought experiment about a second, contemporary American Civil War. Questions like: How in the world have California and Texas—two states so firmly demarcated as “blue” and “red” that presidential candidates don’t bother campaigning in them anymore—formed an alliance to overthrow a third-term president? How did this war even get started? Which side represents which ideological positions? And if there are no clean answers to those questions, does that make Garland a No Labels-style centrist? Perhaps he’s guilty of the same commercial calculation behind Michael Jordan’s famous refusal to endorse Harvey Gantt in his race against the racist North Carolina senator Jesse Helms: “Republicans buy sneakers, too.”

While it’s not remotely out of bounds to keep asking these questions, it’s also important to understand Civil War in the larger context of Garland’s career as a novelist and filmmaker, which has often dealt with these violent moments when civilizations collapse or rebuild. The prevailing mission of Civil War—and of other work like The Beach, 28 Days Later, Never Let Me Go, and Dredd—is to look, with a jaundiced eye, on what human beings are capable of doing once the guardrails of society are either removed or reordered. There are politics involved in these situations, of course—Garland has conceded that—but fussing over the usual left/right or red-state/blue-state dichotomies are a limited way of looking at Garland’s work, which has always been more anthropological than political. 

Without engaging in both-sides-ism, we can all broadly agree that America in 2024 is intensely divided, infected with a “rage virus” not unlike the disease that unleashes a zombie-like plague across England in 28 Days Later. Garland’s movie is simply asking: What would happen if society’s rickety scaffolding fell apart? What would make America any different than other nations embroiled in civil conflict? (Other than, you know, the weapons of war its angriest dipsticks can buy over the counter?) There comes a time when politics—which itself needs a structure—yields to the raw impulses of human nature. Garland is frequently optimistic that some people can still cling firmly to their values, but he creates situations where everything is up for grabs. 

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Though Garland did not have a hand in adapting his 1996 novel The Beach for the screen—those duties fell to John Hodge, who’d scripted director Danny Boyle’s three previous films (Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, and A Life Less Ordinary)—the letter of his book survived, if not quite the spirit. His mordantly cynical premise plays like Swiss Family Robinson meets Lord of the Flies, as young backpackers try to carve out their version of utopia on a secluded lagoon in the Gulf of Thailand. The film version cast a then white-hot Leonardo DiCaprio as Richard, a vapid American pleasure-seeker whose wanderlust leads him to ache for an experience that can’t be found in any old travel book. Even when he takes up residence in an authentically shitty flophouse in Bangkok, Richard finds himself surrounded by other young Americans whose “adventures” are only slightly more exotic than their usual routine of smoking cheap weed and watching TV. 

It wouldn’t be accurate to say that Richard catches a break when he meets a crazed, half-feral maniac who calls himself “Daffy Duck” (Robert Carlyle) and slits his wrists later the same evening, but he does find what he’s looking for. Daffy Duck tells Richard about an untouched idyll in the gulf and leaves him a map to this paradise before he dies—which, in retrospect, seems like passing along a curse. Since no paradise for a guy like Richard would be complete without an extremely hot Frenchwoman, he invites a fellow traveler, Françoise (Virginie Ledoyen), and her boyfriend Étienne (Guillaume Canet), who seems blissfully unaware that he’ll get discarded later. The island they seek is so secluded that they have to swim there from a neighboring island yet it turns out to be more settled than they imagine.

The film version of The Beach never fully connects with the pessimistic heart of Garland’s novel, but it’s there if you can squint past the superficial love triangle (and love rectangle, when a second woman enters the picture) and notice the compromises that doom this utopia. 

It starts with the trio landing on the island and wandering into a cannabis field that looks as endless and seductive as the poppies in The Wizard of Oz, checking the “smoking weed forever” box off the backpacker-paradise list. Their first rude surprise is that the field belongs to armed gunmen, who stand between them and the like-minded young nomads who have built a community around the stunning lagoon they seek. The community’s de facto leader Sal (Tilda Swinton) tells them that the drug farmers will tolerate their existence, so long as nobody else turns up. 

From the start, Garland picks away at the illusion of this civilization forged on communal togetherness and back-to-basics living, casting the beach as something akin to Albert Brooks and Julie Hagerty attempting to live out Easy Rider in a Winnebago in Lost in America. When Sal takes Richard to the mainland in a small motorboat to replenish their rice supplies, they’re inundated with requests for creature comforts that not even the residents of Gilligan’s Island could access, let alone an ostensibly uninhabited island. It gets worse: After a shark attack kills one Swede and mortally injures another, the latter is carted out to the woods because it would be too much of a buzzkill to have him die in the commune. That’s a particularly nasty turn of the plot, but it speaks to Garland’s dim view of new civilizations that are making up rules on the fly. When idealists like Richard have their value tested when there’s no accountability, they often come up short. 

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Two years after The Beach, Garland would again work with Boyle, but this time he wrote directly for the screen. With 28 Days Later, civilization crumbles not long after activists release an agitated chimpanzee from a laboratory in London and a highly contagious “rage virus” rips through the population, turning ordinary people into murderous zombie-like creatures about 10 seconds after infection. By the time Jim (Cillian Murphy), a bicycle courier, wakes from a coma four weeks later, he discovers the hospital and most of the city have been abandoned, as if he’s suddenly Charlton Heston in The Omega Man. Jim runs into a handful of survivors, notably a tough loner named Selena (Naomie Harris) and, later, a taxi driver (Brendan Gleeson) and his daughter (Megan Burns), all of whom have learned, in a short time, the ruthlessness necessary to stay alive. 

Society has totally collapsed in the Great Britain of 28 Days Later, which has no government or security in place, much less the broadcasting power that might bring some semblance of order to the country. Jim learns from Selena that their grim mission is simply to live another day, at least until a faint military transmission from Manchester leads them to travel north, seeking a blockade that might provide them some protection—and, perhaps, some hope. By setting 28 Days Later on an island nation and limiting the virus’ gestation period to 10-to-20 seconds, Garland offers the tantalizing possibility that Great Britain could be quarantined from the rest of humanity, unlike an epidemic that can travel before revealing itself. Nevertheless, it’s a terrifying plunge into moral chaos: Jim has awoken to a world where he needs to limit his attachments and kill other people with short notice. 

But Garland gets a chance to sink his teeth into a new civilization when the four survivors reach Manchester and discover a fortified compound under the command of Major Henry West (Christopher Eccleston), who has his own vision of how the human race can prevail. On the slightly dodgy side, West and his brutish devotees are keeping a zombified soldier alive on a chain for observation, under the not-terrible logic that they can learn how long it will take him to starve to death. On the alarmingly dodgy side, West plans to repopulate the world by coaxing female survivors by radio and confining them to sex slavery—which, judging from the hoots of West’s men, won’t be a sober undertaking. This final third of 28 Days Later may be the least compelling stretch of the film—what can our heroes do at this point but get the hell out of Dodge?—but it does reveal an fittingly ugly understanding of the spoils of war, especially as they relate to soldiers unchecked by leadership. Here, West’s remaking of society is an indulgence, an end-of-the-world fortress as uninhabited lagoon. 

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Just before he started to get behind the camera—unofficially with 2012’s Dredd and officially with 2014’s Ex Machina—Garland lobbied the novelist Kazuo Ishiguro for the chance to adapt his dystopian romance Never Let Me Go into a screenplay. The material was tailor-made for Garland, taking place in an alternate universe circa 1978 where medical breakthroughs have extended human life expectancy beyond 100 years, with the rather large caveat that less fortunate humans will have to sacrifice parts of themselves. Literally. At a British boarding school called Hailsham, students are encouraged to create art and play on the grounds, but they’re told of terrible consequences if they go over the fence. As young adults, they’re moved to The Cottages, a rustic yet comfortable group home where they watch TV and enjoy the occasional day trip, but don’t often leave the farm. 

Under these mysterious conditions, Never Let Me Go develops another bizarre love triangle, this one starting in adolescence and leading into adulthood, with Kathy H (Carey Mulligan) and Ruth C (Keira Knightley) both pining for the sensitive, volatile Tommy D (Andrew Garfield), but Ruth C ultimately taking the initiative. There are several bigger twists that Ishiguro’s story pulls—none of which I’ll spoil here—but the basic idea is that these characters are raised to be “donors” and once they’ve donated as many vital organs as they can to more privileged people, they die. (The euphemism for such deaths in this world is “complete.”) Some who live longer, like Kathy, are “carers” who look after donors until they complete, giving them the emotional support that ordinary citizens are presumably too shame-addled to provide. 

The word “presumably” carries a lot of weight here, because Garland and director Mark Romanek, taking their cues from the novel, don’t tell us anything about how this world came to be or how such a class of humans could be treated so abominably. There’s a metaphor here, perhaps, about how we ruthlessly “farm” animals for our dinner, which syncs up with another British science fiction novel,Under the Skin. But Garland and Romanek are more interested in the tragedy of three doomed young people who don’t fight for survival so much as make an argument for their own souls. Is this dour society—and my God does Romanek make it dour—that unmoved by their plight? We may find out that, yes, society is that unmoved, but the film is missing any sense of the enforcement mechanism that keeps “donors” in place. Once they figure out what’s happening to them, what’s stopping them from trying to run? 

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In Dredd, there’s no such ambiguity about enforcement. Pulling from a couple of Judge Dredd comic book storylines, Garland’s script suggests the day-in-the-life trainee/veteran dynamic of Training Day fused with a punchy, B-movie rendition of Robocop. The film’s credited director, Pete Travis, left the troubled production before it was completed and Garland reportedly had a heavy influence behind the scenes. Whatever the case, Dredd gave Garland the opportunity to explore another post-apocalyptic dystopia, this time a 2080 nuclear wasteland where the entire east coast has been consolidated into Mega-City One, a brutalist sprawl where 800 million residents are crammed into towers that can house tens of thousands of people. The police only have the resources to cover a fraction of the 17,000 violent crimes committed every day, so the force has been reduced to “Judges” who mete out justice quickly and sometimes lethally, without the hassle of a court system. 

Such a system is open to abuse, to put it gently, even with a rigorous recruitment program designed to weed out weak and corruptible judges, but Dredd (Karl Urban) walks the line with a by-the-books stoicism. Upon hearing that his trainee, a new recruit named Cassandra Anderson (Olivia Thirlby), got through the system without passing her aptitude tests, Dredd is extremely skeptical, but Cassandra’s psychic abilities give her a unique tool to read difficult situations. When a gruesome triple homicide brings the duo to Peach Trees, a 200-story slum block ruled by prostitute-turned-drug-lord “Ma-Ma” Madrigal (Lena Headey), the building gets sealed off and they’re locked into a free-for-all with Ma-Ma and her waves of henchmen. 

Despite the echoes of Robocop, Dredd mostly limits social commentary in favor of wall-to-wall action; even Ma-Ma’s lucrative time-shifting designer drug, “Slo-Mo,” functions mostly as an aesthetic gimmick, like bullet-time at half speed. But Garland does his fair share of world-building here, too, imagining a society that’s not reborn after a nuclear holocaust but dramatically perverted by it, forced into a barren urban hellscape that doesn’t offer even the order of a police state. We can be disturbed by a system where a single person can serve as judge, jury, and executioner, but Dredd’s routine is to put Band-Aids on a gaping wound, choosing which horrors to address and which ones to ignore. 

That Dredd and Cassandra visit a notoriously violent tower like the Peach Trees—a place without trees, let alone any evidence of fresh fruit—comes as a surprise to Ma-Ma, who’d colonized the entire building for her operation. But within this impossible situation, Garland finds enough room to humanize Dredd through his relationship with Cassandra, whose ability to understand people her partner regards flatly as victims or perps softens up his perspective a little. One piece of connective tissue in all these films is the contrast between Garland’s dim view of civilization’s architects and his belief in the nobility of individuals who refuse to be corrupted by their surroundings. 

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Though Garland has spent much of his time since Dredd fussing over the tech excesses of Ex Machina and Devs and the strange eco-horror of Annihilation, Civil War marks a return to earlier obsessions. And while he no doubt suggests Civil War as a chilling wake-up call to a country that’s coming apart at the seams, he’s never been interested in how his dystopias are created so much as what it’s like for people to live within them. The war photographers in the film are cut from the same dramatic cloth as the survivors in 28 Days Later, the “donors” in Never Let Me Go, and the partners in Dredd—all summoning enough courage to assert themselves as humans and seek justice in a deeply unjust place. They are a sliver of hope for a better society.