re: A24's Civil War - Spoiler Thread... eventually

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I wish we got more background as to what happened to set everything off The movie seems to infer it's a dictatorial president but they should have given is a window into what that looked like

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At first I felt like it was missing this, but the more I’ve sat on it I think the way it kept all of that out is the only way this movie would’ve worked to accomplish what it was trying to do

World building is always great until you start making real hard and defined rules, if they had set a real timeline or trigger or specifics of the events, that automatically becomes the focus of the movie. This entire thread would be nothing but arguments about why the war made no sense or the factions made no sense or the decisions of the characters make no sense (you already see that in this thread as it is). People would naturally start moralizing the fake conflict and adding even more real world context to try to connect into this plot and again just add noise to the point I think it seeks to make

The movie isn’t really about the war, certainly not about what started it or who started it, more so about the people who are and have lived in the war for this long. We don’t need to see what started it because the focus is on the impact it’s had on the country and the countries people. The action in the movie is surprising and shocking to us as new people in this world, but until the end most of the violence and destruction is just a normal day in the life for these characters

This is gonna sound funny but it’s got some correlation to Planet of the Apes. We the audience are dropped into a familiar place that seems like home but the realization is that despite the setting being familiar, something has so drastically changed the landscape of society that it’s created an entirely different universe without even explaining the changes that took place (discounting the 70 prequels). Which is intended to allow the viewer to be more analytical of the issue at hand (war in this case) instead of getting bogged down in plot lore