Abstract
Alex Garland’s recent films – Civil War (2024) and Warfare (2025) – have been critiqued on the left for their lack of political commitment and as propaganda for US military imperialism, respectively. One reviewer of Civil War, however, reads the movie as a biting satire of the dire state of US journalism and its overwhelming desire for vacuous and decontextualised spectacles. This article considers whether Warfare might also be a subtextual critique of US imperialism, one that reveals a profound moral degeneration at the heart of US politics and culture. If so, the article suggests that Garland’s critique is too subtle in the face of rampant authoritarianism. But if the film is simply a straightforward representation of American murderous warmongering, then we might wonder whether there is any way back for the kind of society that produces this kind of ‘entertainment’.