"What kind of American are you?"
The first trailer for A24 and director Alex Garland's (Ex Machina, Annihilation, Men) Civil War is now online, and it outlines a terrifying scenario as the United States is plunged into conflict.
The teaser begins with Nick Offerman's (The Last of Us, Parks and Recreation) U.S. President declaring: "Citizens of America, the so-called Western forces of Texas and California have suffered a very great defeat at the hands of the United States military.”
From there, we see Kirsten Dunst's (Spider-Man, Melancholia) photojournalist attempting to make her way to the White House while air strikes are used against civilians and journalists are shot on sight in the capital. Her character appears to join forces with a group consisting of Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Cailee Spaeny, Karl Glusman, Sonoya Mizuno, and Jonica T. Gibbs, who we see running into Jesse Pelmons' trigger-happy soldier.
The official logline doesn't tell us much ("A race to the White House in a near-future America balanced on the razor's edge. The United States stands on the brink of civil war in a near-future setting"), but Garland did give us a little more to go on during a 2022 interview.
"In the same way that you could say Ex Machina is sci fi, Devs is a tech thriller, and Men is a horror film, Civil War is a war movie – a contemporary war movie,” Garland told Screen Daily. “It was a staggeringly difficult film to shoot. I wrapped five weeks ago, and I’ve been in the edit for the last five weeks. We’re trying to get the film in a rough cut state where everything is broadly what one is intending. But, as well as that, there’s a lot of visual effects in the movie so we’re having to decide which shots were turning over as VFX shots. It’s a very technical, non-stop process at the moment. There’s a lot going on.”
Have a look at the trailer below, along with some stills and a recently released poster, and let us know what you think in the comments section.