US citizens get caught in crossfire as tanks run loose on the streets and explosions galore amidst a rise in separatist movements in the second trailer of Alex Garland’s dystopian action thriller Civil War, starring Nick Offerman, Kirsten Dunst and Cailee Spaeny.
The one-minute-23-second-long trailer, dropped by production house A24 on Tuesday, shows a fractured America in the throes of a new civil war where 19 states have seceded and Texas and California have united.
It begins with Offerman, who plays the US President, appealing to the citizens to fight against “the Florida alliance and the Western forces of Texas and California” as they want to separate themselves from the US. He tells them that these alliances will be welcomed back to the US given that their “illegal secessionist government is deposed”.
In one of the scenes, Wagner Moura tells a soldier that the latter is taking up arms against the so-called enemies without knowing which side he is fighting for. “Someone’s trying to kill us. We are trying to kill them,” the soldier coldly replies, which takes Spaeny’s photojournalist by surprise.
The rest of the trailer does not reveal anything about the plot. Battle sequences taking place in both Washington and New York are shown in the latter parts of the video.
Devastating footage of soldiers infiltrating buildings, fighting with tanks and blowing up the Lincoln Memorial are set to a haunting whistle cover of Samuel A. Ward’s America the Beautiful, a patriotic hymn celebrating the natural beauty and unity of the United States.
“An adrenaline-fueled thrill ride through a near-future fractured America balanced on the razor's edge,” reads the official description of the film on A24’s website.
Garland, who is well-known for his films like Ex Machina (2014), Men (2022) and Annihilation (2018), has put forth his take on American politics in this upcoming dystopian thriller.
A24, on the other hand, is the studio behind films like Hereditary (2018), Moonlight (2016), Lady Bird (2017) and The Witch (2015).
Also starring Stephen McKinley Henderson and Sonoya Mizuno, Civil War is slated to release in theatres on April 12.
