Amid ongoing debate over whether Alex Garland’s latest film sufficiently spells out its stakes, two THR critics ponder the burdens of political art during a particularly fraught election year.

DAVID ROONEY: We’re nearing the middle of one of the most contentious election years in America’s history, with bitter divisions making a mockery of the increasingly obsolete appellation, “United States.” People are ANXIOUS as they weigh a presidential vote destined to fuel the rage of one side or the other, potentially inciting violence.

In probably the most rah-rah American movie of recent years, 2022’s Top Gun: Maverick, the foreign enemy with a uranium enrichment plant that needs bombing was identified with vague allusions at best, just as the enemy was in the sequel’s progenitor, 36 years earlier. It’s no great leap to imagine that as a strategic choice by studio bean-counters to avoid alienating any international market.

In the movie’s opening minutes, we learn that militarized troops dubbed the Western Forces are fighting for the secessionist alliance of California and Texas. That unlikely union seems to announce that this is not today’s America. It shrugs off the standard red/blue binary of the American political landscape with an evasiveness that many have interpreted as a lack of the kind of ideological coherence that’s needed now more than ever.

Civil War raises the question of whether our precarious moment — with a second Trump term a distinct possibility — is the right time for coyness in political art. 

LOVIA GYARKYE: What’s striking about the reactions to Civil War is how much they reflect this anxious national need for moral clarity and direction. People have always projected onto art, but there seems to be a renewed desperation for it to tell us how to be and what to do. I think there’s value in these conversations, because I believe popular culture is a critical space for negotiating our understanding and awareness of politics. But can art stand in for political education?

But elsewhere, I was bothered by the film’s vague anti-war position, which just feels inadequate to the national and geopolitical moment. War is bad, but what else?

Civil War feels eager to warn Americans of incoming doom, but doesn’t want to name the evils. Perhaps there is a real-world timeline in which Texas and California would form an alliance, but some fleshing out of that scenario would be nice; what are the political realities that make this feasible? Of course, answering that question might offend some viewers, which wouldn’t be good for the bottom line. 

ROONEY: I’m reminded here that in the recent announcement of an upcoming Broadway staging of Romeo + Juliet, to star Rachel Zegler and Kit Connor, director Sam Gold said, “With the presidential election coming up in November, I felt like making a show this fall that celebrates youth and hope, and unleashes the anger young people feel about the world they are inheriting.” The tagline for the production is “The Youth are Fucked,” which suggests a broiling generational fury aimed not at a specific target, but at a world gone crazy.

And maybe that’s the kind of amorphous political art we’re going to be consuming at a time when no one seems to want to shrink their audience by picking a side in a 50/50 polarized nation.