Great war films—and I’d call Alex Garland’s Civil War a great and totally modern war film—should be discomfiting. That’s the moral calculus: War is hell, and any depiction of it should be tinted with the reality of violence and death. It’s how you get something as operatic and brutal as Platoon or the frightful poetry of Apocalypse Now or the quiet outrage of the recent All Quiet on the Western Front. Civil War is as poised as those movies, as balanced between beauty and horror. Writer-director Garland’s vision of a near-future America at war with itself has ravishing moments, an incredible central performance from Kirsten Dunst, and a heart-stopping pace. But this is a movie built around a moral center, and it is as excruciating as any you’re likely to see this year.
Which is all to its credit. The America Civil War depicts—in which so-called Western Forces (an armed alliance between California, Texas, and other states) fight a fascist US government—has fallen so far off its axis that Dunst’s character—Lee, a pitiless and ambitious photojournalist inured to death—is the closest thing we have to a heroine. I’ve never seen Dunst so good. She holds the movie’s anger and sadness in her face, captures its violence with her Leica, and when she smiles, briefly, in a scene where she considers a dress at a boutique in a militarized town, you see what happiness costs her.
Garland broke out with a page-turning novel, The Beach, and parlayed that success into a career as a screenwriter and filmmaker (writing 28 Days Later and directing Ex Machina, Annihilation, and TV’s Devs). His prescience and fearlessness (fire up his Men, I dare you) mean whatever he makes is, to my mind, essential viewing—and this is his best movie since Ex Machina. At the screening I went to, Garland said he began writing Civil War four years ago, feeling that divisiveness was at a perilous height, but today, he added, the country seems even more on the brink.
The chaos in his movie is unrelenting. We start after a suicide bombing in New York, where Lee and her Reuters partner Joel (Wagner Moura) are staging a dangerous trip to Washington, DC, to interview the under-siege president (Nick Offerman). Tagging along is Sammy (played by Stephen McKinley Henderson), a veteran reporter, and also a rookie photographer named Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). The foursome does feel like a slightly contrived movie conceit—a gang of contrasting personalities—and I found the mentor-mentee relationship between Lee and Jessie strained. But never mind: In mere moments Civil War gives you its first unpleasant sequence, a stop at a gas station run by scary militia members. From there we arrive at a brutal suburban firefight. And then a roadside ambush. And then an encounter with Jesse Plemons as an armed psychopath that you won’t get out of your head.
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