In Alex Garland‘s 2024 thriller Civil War, reporters and photojournalists travel throughout America as the nation stands on the brink of civil war. The film is an unflinching look at the fragility of democracy and at the people caught in the middle of conflict. The war drama was positively received by critics and viewers, praised for its realistic depiction of a nation in decline. The film came at a time when the country stood divided, and two years later, little has changed. This could be why it is still resonating with viewers.
Streaming data from FlixPatrol shows that Civil War is gaining momentum on Prime Video in the US. The film recently debuted on the streamer’s top ten chart and is slowly climbing toward the top. It is ranked eighth in the chart at the time of writing, largely dominated by new movies like Crime 101 and Rebecca Ferguson‘s Mercy. Civil War was written and directed by Garland and stars Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Jesse Plemons, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Nick Offerman, Karl Glusman, Sonoya Mizuno, and Jefferson White, among others.
Critics were largely impressed by the film, giving it an 81% score on the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes. “Tough and unsettling by design, Civil War is a gripping close-up look at the violent uncertainty of life in a nation in crisis,” their consensus reads. However, viewers felt that the film had a major gap that detracted from the story. “Civil War does a good job of putting the viewer on the ground, although it’ll be frustrating for anyone hoping to get any clues as to what caused the conflict in the first place,” they said.
Collider Exclusive · Oscar Best Picture Quiz Which Oscar Best Picture Is Your Perfect Movie? Parasite · Everything Everywhere · Oppenheimer · Birdman · No Country
Five Oscar Best Picture winners. Five completely different visions of what cinema can be — and what it can do to you. One of them is the film that was made for the way your mind works. Ten questions will figure out which one.
🪜Parasite
🌀Everything Everywhere
☢️Oppenheimer
🐦Birdman
🪙No Country for Old Men
01
What kind of film experience do you actually want? The best movies don’t just entertain — they leave something behind.
02
Which idea grabs you most in a film? Great films are driven by a central obsession. What’s yours?
03
How do you like your story told? Form is content. The way a story is shaped changes what it means.
04
What makes a truly great antagonist? The opposition defines the protagonist. What kind of opposition fascinates you?
05
What do you want from a film’s ending? The final note is the one that lingers. What do you want it to sound like?
06
Which setting pulls you in most? Where a film takes place shapes everything — mood, stakes, what’s even possible.
07
What cinematic craft impresses you most? Every great film has a signature — a technical or artistic element that makes it unmistakable.
08
What kind of main character do you root for? The protagonist is the lens. Who you choose to follow says something about you.
09
How do you feel about a film that takes its time? Pace is a choice. Some films sprint; others let tension accumulate slowly, deliberately.
10
What do you want to feel walking out of the cinema? The best films leave a mark. What kind of mark do you want?
The Academy Has Decided Your Perfect Film Is…
Your answers have pointed to one Oscar Best Picture winner above all others. This is the film that was made for the way your mind works.
Parasite
You are drawn to films that operate on multiple levels simultaneously — that begin in one genre and quietly, brilliantly migrate into another. Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite is a film about class, desire, and the architecture of inequality that manages to be darkly funny, deeply suspenseful, and genuinely shocking across a single extraordinary running time. Your instinct is for cinema that hides its true intentions until the moment it’s ready to reveal them. Parasite is exactly that — a film that rewards close attention and punishes assumptions, right up to its devastating final image.
Everything Everywhere All at Once
You want it all — and this film gives you all of it. The Daniels’ Everything Everywhere All at Once is one of the most maximalist films ever made: action comedy, multiverse sci-fi, family drama, existential crisis, and a genuinely earned emotional core that sneaks up on you amid the chaos. You are someone who responds to ambition, who doesn’t want cinema to choose between being entertaining and being meaningful. This film refuses that choice entirely. It is overwhelming by design, and its overwhelming nature is precisely the point — because the feeling of being crushed by infinite possibility is exactly what it’s about.
Oppenheimer
You are drawn to cinema on a grand scale — films that understand history not as a backdrop but as a force, and that place their characters inside that force and watch what happens. Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is a film about the terrifying gap between what we can do and what we should do, told with the full weight of one of the most consequential moments in human history behind it. You want your films to feel important without feeling self-important — to earn their ambition through sheer craft and the gravity of their subject. Oppenheimer does exactly that. It is enormous, complicated, and refuses easy comfort.
Birdman
You are drawn to films that foreground their own construction — that make the how of the filmmaking part of the what it’s about. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman, shot to appear as a single continuous take, is cinema examining itself through the cracked mirror of a fading actor’s ego. You respond to formal daring, to the feeling that a film is doing something that probably shouldn’t be possible. Michael Keaton’s performance and Emmanuel Lubezki’s restless camera create something genuinely unlike anything else — a film that is simultaneously about creativity, relevance, self-destruction, and the impossibility of ever truly knowing if your work means anything at all.
No Country for Old Men
You are drawn to cinema that trusts silence, that refuses to explain itself, and that treats dread as a form of meaning. The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men is a film about the arrival of a new kind of evil — implacable, arbitrary, and utterly indifferent to the moral frameworks we use to make sense of the world. It is one of the most formally controlled films ever made, and its controlled restraint is what makes it so terrifying. You want your films to haunt you, not comfort you. You are not interested in resolution if resolution would be dishonest. No Country for Old Men is honest in a way that most cinema never dares to be.
What Collider Had to Say About ‘Civil War’
Matthew Donato was impressed by multiple of the film’s feats when he reviewed it for Collider at the 2024 SXSW film festival. “Civil War starkly represents America’s reputation from the outside and a dissection of our nation’s dodgy relationship with journalism. It bares all, prods at festering wounds, and challenges the audience to reckon with its ideas. You might not vibe with what it all means, nor does Garland maybe even know, but where the same approach fails in Men, I’ll be thinking about Civil War for years to come,” he wrote in his review of Civil War, adding,
“Hopefully, that’s not because life imitates art, but because of the exceptional filmmaking that enraptured me with our country’s fragile democratic status and how that looks through Lee’s camera. The life of a combat journalist is never one to envy, nor does Civil War glorify retaliation on blockbuster action-hero terms. Garland may have just delivered one of the most vicious and unrelenting watches of the year, one that I’ll keep debating and untangling both in my head and with others for a good long while.”
Civil War is available to stream on Prime Video in the US. Stay tuned to Collider for more updates.
