“Civil War” movie is worse than the real thing

The new film "Civil War" is a cinematic achievement: the movie might be worse than a real American civil war. Perhaps that was director Alex Garland's intention. His film is a series of horrifying set pieces — gas station torture, journalists' executions, a massive California-and-Texas invasion of Washington D.C. — that add up to a warning. If we don't steer away from our current path of political conflict, Garland suggests, this could be the end of the United States. To be fair, there's established logic in this message. As Romanian philosopher E.M. Cioran wrote: "When we perceive the end in…