Civil War (the movie) is absolutely right and completely wrong.

A review. Or something.

Jesse Plemons in Civil War. He’s who the Devil will look like in your dreams for a long time to come.

Cassidy Steele Dale writes to equip you with the forecasts, foresight skills and perspectives, and tools you may need to create a better, kinder world.

And one of those ways is to review a movie that matters.

I saw Alex Garland’s new movie Civil War this past Sunday evening.

Go see it. It’s terrifying and great and great and terrifying.

If you don’t like political movies, go see it. If you don’t like scary movies, go see it. If you don’t like politically scary movies, go see it.

Previously I made a few guesses as to what the movie would contain. I guessed mostly right. (I’m not patting myself on the back: these weren’t long leaps to make.)

• Civil War is in fact a dystopian-horror road movie: a series of haunting vignettes as the main characters, a group of war correspondents, try to get to DC to interview the President before enemy forces can reach the White House. Part of the idea behind constructing the movie this way was to offer as many chances as possible to shock and haunt viewers — that everybody would leave the theater with something that would change them.

• The warring sides in the movie make no political sense because Alex Garland didn’t want viewers to be able to find “their side” in the movie and want any particular side to win or lose the war. Garland takes this much farther than I anticipated: all of the sides wear nearly identical uniforms — you can’t tell which faction is fighting whom in any given scene — and all of them are bad. There are no good guys in the movie except the journalist main characters and they’re not quiiiiite heroic themselves. (There’s one hero badass in the movie but it’s not who you will see coming.)

• I guessed that the movie would be a modern-day sorta-remake of Sinclair Lewis’ It Can’t Happen Here — and it probably is — but I don’t care enough any more to go check if I was right on that or not.

Why not? Civil War has a plot but the plot barely matters. There’s an ending but the ending barely matters, either. The fact that the civil war in the movie started in the first place was the point. What people did once it started was the point.

And democracy? Was the civil war in the movie fought to preserve something — to restore anything? The movie doesn’t tell us. No one in the movie speaks of democracy at all. It’s no longer even an aspiration. There is no slow-motion flag waving heroically in the breeze while a distant trumpet plays in the background. For any side or any character at all. This is not a feel-good movie.

Civil War is a very simple movie. Here’s what the movie and its makers are trying to say:

It can happen here…

• Americans may be exceptional but we’re not special and we’re not magic. You should be scared of what you’re about to do (according to the movie’s makers) because you’re about to do it.

… but you shouldn’t secretly wish for a new civil war because (a) you secretly believe it will solve the “problem of the other side,” (b) you secretly want revenge, or ( c) you believe your side will win…

• Some people want one. Some people very much do.

… because a civil war here would be very, very bad. And different and worse than your politically-and-Hollywood-constrained mind can imagine, you Michael-Bay-movie-brain-poisoned dumbass.

• Bodies hanging from highway overpasses, an immediately-tanked economy, American interstates blocked with miles of burned-out cars, a mass grave with dozens of your neighbors lying in dead in it because they were the “wrong” kind of American for the man with the machinegun, neighborhood gas stations with torture chambers… You have a neighborhood gas station, don’t you?

Here’s the thing: The makers of Civil War are absolutely right and completely wrong. The warning the movie’s makers are trying to deliver — and the conversation they’re trying to provoke — isn’t timely; it’s a few years too late.

I’m not saying we decided a few years ago that we’ll have another civil war and that it’s inevitable and it’s coming soon; I’m saying the opposite. I’m saying that I think a few years ago we decided that we won’t. But we’re not out of the woods yet.

But like I’ve said before: I say things it’s too early to believe.

Why is next week.