‘Civil War’ review: Alex Garland glimpses a scary future in this American horror story

Films don’t come much bigger than Alex Garland’s latest. With Civil War, the writer and director behind movies like Ex Machina and Men has walked onto a larger and more prominent stage than ever before. Being both noted studio A24’s most expensive project to date and Garland’s most explicitly political, Civil War was always going to be hard to ignore. Does it hold up to the scrutiny?

The film views the chaos of a contemporary internal conflict in the United States through the eyes of journalists and photojournalists, not necessarily a profession considered particularly exciting in the pantheon of war cinema. Kirsten Dunst, who plays war photographer Lee Miller, leads the gang of scrappy reporters – who include Cailee Spaeny as a photographer just starting out, and Wagner Moura and Stephen McKinley Henderson as grizzled journalists – on a surely fatal road trip from New York to Washington D.C., where the President (Nick Offerman) is soon to be violently deposed by the ‘Western Alliance’.

As the quartet try to survive on the road, they have nervy encounters galore with armed strangers of all kinds. Garland handles these often horrible collisions expertly, the stand-off with Jesse Plemons’ gun-wielding psychopath proving the most haunting. The dialogue is believable, the acting is impeccable, and Garland knows how to get your pulse racing. There are some beautiful moments – sparks dancing in a burning forest – and not a second of boredom.

In his promotion of the film, Garland has talked about wanting to celebrate journalists. In an age of both dwindling media funding and mistrust of journalists (intertwined problems, of course), this is an admirable goal for a filmmaker. There is a danger, however, that this story glamourises them a little too much, presenting them as unstoppable, almost fearless beacons of truth. Garland knows how to humanise his characters, and none of the quartet is perfect, but it can feel as though the director wants you to leave the cinema thinking that photojournalism is the most noble of all wartime vocations. The soldiers who frequently allow the gang to follow them into the most extraordinarily dangerous situations never seem to find them irritating, despite their buzzing around like flies and the harsh truth that the images might not find much of an audience in such a bloodbath.

These quibbles aside, Civil War is something of a staggering achievement of spectacle and sound, with vast swathes of the US convincingly up in smoke. Not once do we get the foul whiff of CGI; not once are we taken out of the engrossing reality of the protagonists.
While Garland may have ruffled feathers during press for the film, saying that it is “fucking idiotic” to say that ideological arguments over politics are about “good and bad”, the film is too well-made to polarise opinion in this way. In the long run this neutrality may prevent it from being truly loved, or becoming anyone’s favourite film. But there is absolutely no doubt that it is a triumphant achievement by a director truly hitting his stride.