Alex Garland’s Civil War is his most terrifying film yet, and it’s not even classified as horror. For Americans plugged into the current political climate, this story hits close to home as well as plays on fears and paranoia (baseless or otherwise). Garland turns the seemingly outlandish prospect of a Second American Civil War into a haunting narrative that will leave viewers rattled or disgusted — maybe even both.
Rather than putting a soldier into the driver’s seat of this what-if war drama (with the framework of a road-trip story), Garland elects a neutral party who is used to being on the front lines of combat. This leads to a photojournalist named Lee (Kirsten Dunst), who has snapped one atrocity after another throughout her illustrious career. Lee has witnessed humanity at its worst and hardly flinched from it. All that is set to change, though, when the latest war is at home rather than in a far corner of the world.
It is through Lee and her colleagues — an adrenaline-seeking journalist (Wagner Moura), a New York Times reporter (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and an aspiring young photojournalist (Cailee Spaeny) — that viewers get a cold hard look at the now-ubiquitous chaos that has consumed Garland’s version of the U.S. Their objective is to reach the holed-up, three-term President (Nick Offerman) for a rare interview. Doing so then entails 800-plus miles of danger as the group travels to reach D.C.
When poking at society’s open wounds, Garland usually doesn’t hold back. Civil War, however, is a touch quieter than most of his other films. An odd statement considering the opening scene has a bomb exploding in realistic fashion, and at another point, a character struggles to crawl out of a massive grave site. Nevertheless, Garland’s direction is more studied and intimate than ever. A far cry from earlier promotion making the film out to be mindless entertainment.
Focusing on the tail-end of the war and not explaining any of the actual politics involved is strange. Perhaps Garland felt that if his characters are members of the press, who naturally maintain some semblance of objectivity despite their own personal feelings, he could get away with a vague standpoint. And, for the most part, he does. At the same time, Civil War hands in solid character work and builds proper dynamics that all bolster the available story, not to mention breed sympathy for journalists. Lee and everyone’s own personal politics are not so easily read or accessible, but Garland does a fair job of showing where these characters stand in these trying times.
In addition to character profiling, Civil War excels at creating pulse-pounding thrills. Lee and the others understandably shake in terror and freeze up as they are held at gunpoint, shot at, and even tortured a bit. Garland very well knows how to deliver an intense set-piece even within a verité-style structure. Showing the insurgents in their element involves shocking sequences that will, for many folks, leave a bitter taste in mouths. Garland leans into barefaced exploitation as armed bigots menace and kill characters of color. One particular scene will catapult the audience back to a fairly recent yet short time where street harassment and violence toward one minority group was all over the news.
Compensating for the ambiguity and glaring detachment from recognizable politics, Civil War still manages to devastate and give some food for thought. Not quite enough on the latter, however, Garland’s direction and execution are still guaranteed to stoke both fresh and pent-up emotions as well as make a plea for self-actualization. This hypothetical and hopefully impossible scenario plays out in the most overwhelming manner imaginable.
Civil War premiered at South by Southwest 2024.
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