For years the annual South by Southwest arts and tech festival in Austin, Texas has been a kind of marketing launch pad for music and films … and media “elites” asserting their influencer status. The hype this congregation can create is pretty impressive.

At the top of the list of the “most hyped and hyper-ventilated over” at this year’s SXSW was the new film, “Civil War”, which I finally got around to seeing last night.

If you follow news and culture at all you know that “Civil War” imagines a modern day USA in all out violent conflict between at least two factions. In the film the focus is on a small group of journalists looping through the eastern seaboard countryside. Leaving a war torn New York and looking for a back way in to Washington D.C., where they tell us they plan to interview the President. Kirsten Dunst is the lead, playing a hardened war photographer.

As they are so often wont to do, those at the levers of the hype machine — declared “Civil War” “a masterpiece!”. I’m pretty sure this is the same crowd constantly declaring every new pop song, old building and pricey hand bag “iconic”. (For me, the constant over-use of “iconic” has gotten so bad it’s like someone hammering a gong next to my head every time I hear it.)

I’m not here to say “Civil War” is bad. It’s not. It’s quite a good film, and thoroughly admirable in giving life to the nightmare imaginings of quite a few Americans. But, please people. This is not “8 1/2” or “2001” or “Lawrence of Arabia.” What it is is a very well crafted piece of speculative fiction with an umbilical attachment to our 2024 zeitgeist.

The film’s creator, writer-director Alex Garland, (his earlier film, “Ex Machina”, about a Peter Thiele-like tech billionaire who has created a sentient robot in his New Zealand-y forest hideaway is excellent, and bit closer to a “masterpiece”), is quite canny about the set-up for his film. While the sitting President, played by Nick Offerma, is clearly a thuggish autocrat, serving a third term and demagoguing about “restoring America … “, the film plays with little other sense of who is “right” and who is “wrong”.

Perhaps its for this reason that audiences after screenings this past week in Texas and other red areas were not offended by what they watched, suggesting they did not see themselves in Offerman’s Trump-like character or his supporters, several of whom Dunst and her crew encounter on their way to DC.

How any MAGA cultist fails to see a full Trump Part Deux future in Offerman and “Civil War” is beyond my ability to understand. But then as I say, Garland’s construction is canny in the way he doesn’t rub anyone’s nose in ham-fisted ideological soliloquies or red meat antagonisms. That, and as we all know, MAGA America is not exactly known for its grasp of nuance.

Part of Garland’s plan for avoiding “in your face” partisan antagonism lies in the decision to make his lead characters journalists. Professionals doing a job. People out there just “getting the story” and letting audiences back home “decide.” The characters’ entrenched apoliticism has apparently bothered some lefty/blue audiences, who find the characters unsympathetic to what’s going on around them.Never mind that Dunst and her crew suffer terribly at the hands of various combatants, most notably Dunst’s real-life husband, Jesse Plemons, playing a, dare I say?, highly recognizable modern American “type.”

What’s perhaps most admirable about the film, which as I say is very well staged and acted (with another excellent sound design, BTW), is that it can’t help but engender a conversation about how close we could be to this sort of open warfare in real modern American life?

As I watched, I couldn’t help but ask myself something I think about perhaps too much. Namely, what exactly will my response be if Donald Trump were to suffer yet another substantial popular vote defeat and be elected (again) thanks to the Electoral College. The college being a wildly anachronistic device sustained primarily by right-wing politicians and judges that is 80 years older and arguablyt even less relevant to modern America than the much-mocked 1864 abortion ban recently held up as standing law by the same type of political crowd in Arizona.

Worse, what if this next election is riddled with nefarious activity by Russia or whoever, and then subjected to the kind of blocking and delaying tactics imagined by Trump legal advisor John Eastman, substituting state legislatures, like Arizona’s and Wisconsin’s, for the popular vote of their people?

At my advanced age and obvious decrepitude I’d have to think twice about smearing camo makeup on my face and learning how to fire an AR-15, but I seriously … and I do mean seriously … suspect tens of thousands of people younger and equally outraged Americans will say, in effect, “No fucking way!”

And at that point “Civil War” becomes something more than speculative fiction.