Alex Garland’s Civil War Gets a Gripping First Trailer

Estimated reading time: 2 minutes

Alex Garland’s Civil War is about to rock America with a gripping first-look teaser trailer.

Set in the near future, Civil War follows a journalist played by Kirsten Dunst and a group of friends/colleagues as they make their way through the fractured USA to head to Washington DC.

Alongside Dunst, we find Stephen McKinley Henderson, Wagner Moura, and Cailee Spaen, with some appearances from Jesse Plemons and the inimitable Nick Offerman as the President of the United States.

Check out the trailer below:

Civil War was written and directed by Garland, who is known for the sci-fi hit Ex Machina as well as Annihilation and the recent folk horror, Men. He also wrote the hit British zombie film, 28 Days Later. A24 is producing the film along with Gregory Goodman as well as DNA’s Andrew Macdonald and Allon Reich.

The film’s logline simply states: “A race to the White House in a near-future America balanced on the razor’s edge.” Quite how the fall of America goes down remains to be seen, but it looks as though real-life husband and wife, Plemmons and Dunst, will encounter each other at some point – a nice re-teaming after the pair starred together in The Power of the Dog as well as Season 2 of Fargo. Offerman, meanwhile, previously worked with Garland on the high-concept sci-fi series, Devs.

A recent poster for Civil War teased the dystopian fall of America with troops dug in on the torch of the Statue of Liberty. The new trailer pushes this further, revealing that the President of the United States approved air strikes on American civilians in an attempt to crush the ongoing uprising of the Western Forces and the Florida Alliance. A chilling thought.

Want to read more about Alex Garland? Check out our review of Annihilation as well as our review of his recent hit sci-fi series, Devs.

Ryan Leston is an entertainment journalist and film critic for IGN. You can follow him on Twitter.