Alex Garland’s Civil War was foisted on an unsuspecting U.S. public on April 12th. For some of us, it was the long-anticipated follow-up to Garland’s 2021 freak-out, Men, itself a follow-up to Garland’s 2018 freak-out, Annihilation. For others (which is to say, most people), Civil War was a new Hollywood blockbuster with guns and explosions and Kirsten Dunst looking worried.

I’ve long considered Garland to be one of our more accomplished filmmakers, someone who embraces ideas and possibilities and dares his audiences to think along with him. He’s celebrated in the genre world for 28 Days Later and Dredd (writer, 2002 and 2012), Ex Machina (writer/director, 2014), and the FX miniseries Devs (2020), all of which deal with knotty issues confronting humanity. So it’s not surprising that Garland should launch himself into the political discourse, and produce a film designed to get conversations started and wheels turning.

But could Garland, or producer A24 have foreseen that Civil War would become the #1 movie in America the weekend it opened, or a pundit-driven flashpoint? On the former, I suspect not; on the latter, I can’t imagine they didn’t realize the effect the film would have. Garland’s been all over the media, appearing as a guest on such political fare as “The Daily Show” and “Pod Save America.” Though Civil War sidesteps current blue/red state divisions by envisioning a military alliance between Texas and California, there’s no doubt that it is predicated on the idea of what electing an authoritarian president would do to the social fabric.

Nothing can prepare you for the sight of a missile blowing up the Lincoln Memorial — or the pit that leaves in your stomach. It’s unsettling in a way that images rarely are. But that’s Garland’s M.O.: to jolt viewers awake, shake them by the shoulders as if to say, “Hey — look what’s happening around you. Is THIS the future you want?”

On March 23, 1983, the United States launched the Strategic Defense Initiative, a system intended to protect the country from attack by intercontinental ballistic missiles. Because cultural references were easier to digest than defense plans back then, it was nicknamed “Star Wars.”

Fears of a Soviet invasion were stoked throughout the ‘50s, peaking in 1962 with the Cuban Missile Crisis; by 1984, every provocation put Americans on high alert. The Soviets may have been a year shy of electing the man who would herald a new era of cooperation, but the damage was done. So entrenched was doomsday in the collective unconscious that filmmakers shifted into overdrive. The satires and spy thrillers of the ‘60s gave way to films both sublime and ridiculous. By the early ‘80s, nuclear war was a full-blown cottage industry. Films about the threat urged us to take shelter, play video games, or just end it all.

Which brings us to the quintessential Cold War film of the 80s, John Milius’ Red Dawn. Milius was a known quantity in Hollywood, having written Jeremiah Johnson (1972) for Sydney Pollack and Robert Redford, Magnum Force (1973), and Apocalypse Now (1979); and having written and directed Dillinger (1973) and Conan the Barbarian (1982). He was also a gun nut who sat on the board of the NRA, inspired the character of Walter Sobchak, and undoubtedly chose this opening shot:

Red Dawn, which bowed in August 1984, has the dubious distinction of being the first film to receive the PG-13 rating. Unlike Civil War, which stays within the realm of possibility, Red Dawn takes a laughably implausible concept, stretches it until it breaks, and just keeps on stretching. After title cards detail a world in chaos (“Greens Party gains control of West Germany, demands withdrawal of nuclear weapons from European soil”), we open on the town of Calumet, Colorado, which has seen better days. With its trash-strewn streets and bird shit-streaked statue of Teddy Roosevelt, whatever ‘get up and go’ this town once had has got up and went. In a high school classroom, kids stare into space as a teacher drones on about Genghis Khan.

Then the paratroopers arrive.

And not just any paratroopers. Foreign paratroopers with guns. Guns that take out the teacher and several kids. Sprinting into action, a group of students led by brothers Jed and Matt Eckert (Patrick Swayze and Charlie Sheen) pile into Jed’s pickup truck and hightail it out of town, dodging explosions, gunfire, and rocket-propelled grenades.

Holing up in the mountains while the country goes to hell, Jed and Co. return to Calumet to find it occupied by an evil trifecta: Russian, Cuban, and Nicaraguan forces have flooded the western U.S. seeking a Communist foothold. The extent of the damage isn’t yet known, but red flags are everywhere, literally: Lenin posters, Cyrillic lettering, and Eisenstein’s Alexander Nevsky (1938) at the local cinema.

When Jed and Matt discover their father (Harry Dean Stanton) interned at a “re-education camp,” the realization kicks in: they’re on their own. With U.S. forces nowhere in sight, it’s up to the kids to set things straight. Tasked with minding an elderly couple’s granddaughters, Erica and Toni (Lea Thompson and Jennifer Grey), Jed whisks everyone off to a mountain retreat, which is not as luxe as it sounds. Stocked with enough ammo to arm a small island nation, the kids attack the Soviets with small skirmishes at first, then graduate to bombs, grenades, and RPGs. Eventually, the crew (calling themselves the Wolverines) makes a dent in the enemy operation.

Of course, the stormtrooper-like incompetence of the attacking forces doesn’t help the cause. Trained soldiers take aim, shoot, and miss with startling regularity. The Wolverines always know where the Soviets are, but the Soviets can’t find the Wolverines — until the end, when, instead of ground troops, they send in three machine gun-loaded Mi-24 Hind-A helicopters. Could the fact that they’re speaking two different languages without an interpreter in sight have something to do with it?

But I digress.

Even when contextualized as the product of a gung-ho America juiced by patriotic fervor, some aspects of Red Dawn have not aged well. The film’s take on masculinity is so potent, you can practically smell the testosterone (yes, Virginia, it smells like victory). After they bag a deer, Matt and Jed encourage their buddy Robert (C. Thomas Howell) to drink its blood so he can feel its “spirit” and be “a real hunter.” The group handles their newfound weapons with astonishing ease, as if they’ve been firing bazookas since birth. Following the death of friends and loved ones, the young men are told to resist crying and turn their emotions to anger. It’s a wonder they don’t don animal skins and go full-on Lord of the Flies.

Milius and co-writer Kevin Reynolds would have us believe that through a combination of guerilla tactics and old-fashioned American know-how, a motley assortment of high school kids can defeat a multilateral Soviet army. In that respect, Red Dawn doesn’t bear intense scrutiny. It is, after all, entertainment for the masses. Strap in and suspend your disbelief.

It may also be a case of wish-fulfillment. As Kilgore says in Apocalypse Now, “Someday this war’s gonna end.” The good news: thanks to movies like Red Dawn, it doesn’t have to — and in this war, we come out on top.

The U.S. was involved in some crazy shit in the 80s — check out Turning Point on Netflix — but you’d never know it from watching Red Dawn. As noted, it’s hard to remember a time when we were more united, with the possible exception of right after 9/11. If anything good emerged from our relationship with the U.S.S.R., it was the galvanizing effect it had on the American public. They had the Bomb, we had the Bomb. They put missiles in Cuba, we called their bluff. They put up a wall in Berlin, we told them to tear it down. Proxy wars were fought. Regimes changed. Sometimes the CIA got it right. More often they didn’t.

Red Dawn was remade in 2012, but in Don Bradley’s version, the enemy is the North Koreans. It doesn’t work. An invasion by Kim Jong Un didn’t feel close to imminent back then. Plus, the cultural divide, which cracked open in 2000, was a yawning gulf by then. When Russia began cutting up Ukraine two years later, it seemed to only concern those who understood what Putin’s Russia was capable of. One side preached isolationism, the other recognized our role as a preserver of democracy. For everyone else, appeasement was as good an option as any. Why supply arms to other nations? What have they done for us?

That’s why, for all of its gratuitous violence, xenophobia, and sexism, Red Dawn feels like a throwback to simpler times. To the good old days, when all we feared was nuclear war with the Russians.

I don’t miss the Cold War. No one should. But at least we knew who we were fighting. Today, cleft by domestic strife, with enemies coming as much from within as without, we’ve lost the thread. The unity that pervaded post-World War II America has been replaced by divisions that threaten our way of life. If, come November 6, 2024, we find ourselves on the wrong side of an election, this title card won’t seem like such a fantasy:

A key scene in Civil War finds our journalist heroes pinned down by a sniper alongside a couple of soldiers training their sights on a distant house. When Joel (Wagner Moura) asks what is happening, one soldier answers, “Someone in that house. They’re stuck.” Joel follows with: “Who do you think they are?” The soldier replies, dryly, “No idea.”

That’s the difference between these films. In Red Dawn, the enemy is apparent, black and white (and red). In Civil War, as in America today, it’s unclear who the enemy is. Like the soldiers in that scene, we could go on fighting until we forget which side we’re on.

Is Red Dawn horror? No. Civil War is closer, but I wouldn’t call it horror either. Sure, war is terrifying, and the idea of the U.S. being invaded or splintering into factions is unthinkable. People are shot, hung, run over, and otherwise destroyed in the course of both films, and there’s a good deal of bloodletting, but they never hit traditional genre landmarks.

Red Dawn is a jingoistic pro-war film that scratches an itch for Commie-bashing entertainment. Civil War is an anti-war screed designed to make us think, to throw some broccoli in with the gunfire and explosions. Some view Civil War as a cop-out, as weak for not attacking our national schism head-on. I don’t buy it. Garland isn’t depicting a red/blue state war. He’s blurring the lines. The scene in Civil War that doesn’t work for me is one in which Jesse Plemons, playing a rogue militia member, has a bone to pick with two Asian-American journalists. The film being about interstate conflicts, the insertion of real-world racism hits a discordant note. Sure it could happen, but in a film about Americans fighting Americans, to suddenly turn on those who appear from “elsewhere” feels out of place.

Plus it defeats the point. We live in an age of ambiguity. Of uncertainty. You want clarity? Go see Red Dawn. I’ll be over here, living in the gray.