Civil War | ★★★★ ½ stars | Opens Friday, April 12
Grim and exhilarating, the brilliant new film from the always-ambitious director Alex Garland (Annihilation) is a near-future nightmare of that ultimate doomscrolling scenario: A second civil war in America. This is hard, serious speculative fiction—the dystopian war picture as shrieking klaxon alarm.
The story concerns a team of four journalists traveling from New York to D.C. through the front lines of the conflict. Washington is under siege, but they hope to sneak through and interview the president before the noose closes. It’s an insane idea. “They shoot journalists on sight out there,” one colleague warns.
Kirsten Dunst plays Lee, a legendary photographer with the thousand-yard stare of a war zone veteran. Reuters reporter Joel (Wagner Moura) is the driver and fixer, self-medicating with a steady supply of liquor and weed. Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) is a grizzled old pro who writes for “whatever is left of the New York Times.” Then there’s young Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a twentysomething aspiring photographer about to have her first traumatic experiences with war.
Heading out in an armored SUV, the team encounters scenes of increasingly surreal violence. A brutal firefight in a Pennsylvania office park. A refugee tent city in a derelict football stadium. Bloodied POWs hanging from the rafters of a roadside shed. The episodic structure echoes the upriver journey in Apocalypse Now, one of many nods to that great war film.
As harrowing as the foregrounded action is, the background details are just as disturbing. With bits of tossed-off dialogue and imagery, Garland encourages viewers to fill in the blanks of what has happened to America.
We eventually piece it together: The federal government is at war with multiple military factions and secessionist movements, including “the Florida Alliance” and “the Western Forces.” Garland is careful to never apply any labels—this isn’t an anti-left or anti-right film. It’s an anti-war film.
Still, we get some indicators: The administration in D.C. is coded to read as a fascist regime. The president (Nick Offerman) is in his third term and the FBI has been dissolved. The other guys play rough, too. We overhear one soldier refer to “the Antifa massacre.”
Considered in the context of American politics circa 2024, the effect of all this piecemeal worldbuilding is an accretion of creeping dread. The roughest scene features a secret mass grave tended by the great actor Jesse Plemons as a white nationalist soldier. “We’re Americans!” the journalists plead. “What kind of Americans?” the soldier asks. Garland lets the terrible significance of that question linger.
As mainstream commercial moviemaking, Civil War is a professional piece of work all the way around: The performances are excellent (especially Dunst) and the sound design evokes the whiplash tension of dissociative trauma. Cinematographer Rob Hardy toggles between shaky-cam bloodletting and passages of dark, stubborn beauty. But it’s the function of the film, more than the form, that lingers. Garland clearly intends his movie to be a wake-up call, and I responded to it more as a citizen than a critic, I’m afraid. Some of the images in this film are going to stay with me for a while, I can feel it.
A fierce intelligence pulses beneath the action and one quiet scene serves as an interesting kind of meta moment. Lee, the veteran photographer, is reflecting on her career as a foreign correspondent, back before the horror show came to America. “Every time I sent photos out from a war zone, I thought I was sending a warning: Don’t do this.”
Garland, who also wrote the script, is trying to do the same thing with his film, sending a not-so-distant early warning out into the theaters and multiplexes of America: Don’t do this. Don’t do this. Don’t do this.
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