📽 Watched Civil War.

Set in a presumably near-future time - I suppose 2025 would be a reasonable guess - we see that the US has descended into another civil war. Not a figure of speech, but an actual war with armies, militias and the like.

A definitely-not-Trump President sits in the White House broadcasting to everyone about how he’s about to have the greatest military victory ever seen, everyone says so. Whilst elsewhere, several well-equipped but uncoordinated secession movements - at least Texas, California and Florida if I remember correctly - fight what’s left of the federal military, presumably to gain their independence and remake America into what they think it should be. Which is often a fairly unpleasant vision.

Anyway, we follow a team of war photo-journalists (Reuters and the NYT still exist in this world, at least to some extent) who set off to try and make it to the White House to try to photograph and interview the president for the first time in several months. Washington DC has been made basically impenetrable at this point. And traveling through the rest of a violent, impoverished, suspicious United States isn’t an easy journey.

There’s not a whole lot of backstory. Of course if you remember the January 6th invasion of the US Capitol building you might not really need one, although personally I was a little disappointed to not get to see the buildup and transition, political and social.

The film does seem to take some care not to pit an army of obvious goodies against one of cartoon villains; few people come out looking all that good or virtuous. One wouldn’t necessarily think a California secession movement would politically have a ton in common with a Texas one as it stands today.

In practice, it actually reminded me quite a bit of a non-zombie version of a show like Walking Dead. Very much an action film, albeit one with emotional resonance given the very well done depiction of a war torn US which, apart from being disturbing in its own right, wasn’t a million miles away from scenes one sees from the current horrific IRL wars in Ukraine, Palestine and elsewhere.