Civil War review: If you think you know what it's about, you're probably wrong

There is an inherent audacity in making a film like Civil War, even before writer-director Alex Garland starts to lay out the finer points of his near-future thriller. At a time when the atrocities of war are unfolding in multiple places around the world, and our own country feels perched on the kind of knife’s edge where just about anything could happen, it’s a bold move to make such a film, particularly outside of the more exploitation-heavy genre flights of things like The Purge. Treating a story like this seriously, even from a distance, feels a bit like juggling multiple powder kegs at once.

But Garland has never been one to shy away from a narrative challenge, whether he’s examining one woman’s traumatic envelopment by evil men (Men) or an honest and seductive encounter with an artificial intelligence (Ex Machina). With Civil War, he’s set up another tall order for himself, one built on volatile ingredients in a volatile time, and the first thing you notice about the film is his unflinching ability to maintain focus. A film called Civil War, released in 2024, could have been any one of dozens of different things, and one of its most impressive aspects is how well Garland understands the thing he’s set out to make—a film of tremendous intensity, emotional heft, and downright gut-wrenching violence.

That violence, in Garland’s imagined near-future, begins when California and Texas secede from the Union and form a military known simply as the “Western Forces,” hellbent on marching to Washington D.C. and taking down an autocratic President (Nick Offerman) who’s already talked his way into a third term and is preparing to declare victory even as the White House becomes increasingly encircled by the enemy. But Civil War is not about the military, or the President, or the origins of this particular conflict, because Garland knows that a 2024 audience is smart enough to draw their own conclusions on those fronts.

Instead, the film focuses on a quartet of journalists, all in pursuit of the same goal. Dogged war photographer Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and her partner, reporter Joel (Wagner Moura), are heading out to get “the only story left” at the tail end of this war: a one-on-one interview with a President who would sooner shoot them than talk to them. Still, they’re convinced they can do it if they can just get to D.C. before the Western Forces overwhelm the White House. As their journey begins, they pick up experienced old guard reporter Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and idealistic young photojournalist Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), who worships Lee and just wants a chance to prove herself.

Structurally, then, much of the film takes the form of a road movie, as the four journalists drive the 800 miles or so to D.C. while facing insurrectionists, armed locals, and the general chaos of an Eastern seaboard littered with crashed cars, burning buildings, and American carnage. Along the way, certain expected things happen. Jessie gets her first real brush with death, Sammy helps soften the harder edges of Lee and Joel, and, of course, Lee and Jessie bond over the act of being all-seeing eyes whose job is to bear witness to the worst of humanity.

Garland shoots and paces all of this with the skill and grace of a veteran, and his ability to scale up his vision to reflect a shattered America is truly impressive, even given his track record as a filmmaker who conjures memorable images. His world of crashed helicopters and abandoned shopping malls has all the requisite desolation. His scenes of violence are well-choreographed and artfully brutal. He frames the characters as people out to get the best image through their own lenses, drawing some very intriguing parallels to the work he’s doing behind the scenes.

If things were to stop there and never go any deeper than the predictable human bonding amid outbursts of violence, Civil War would still be a very impressive piece of work. But things don’t stop there. Garland and his cast—particularly Dunst and Spaeny, who are phenomenal in this film—are determined to dig deeper, to get closer to the core of what’s so disturbing about this very plausible future.

The white-hot nucleus of this core is, as Garland has already made clear in interviews, the importance of a free press willing to do the hard work, get deep into the blood and guts, and document the reality of the moment. Simple as that idea might seem, Garland makes it clear through every image that the heroes of Civil War are making very deliberate, very dangerous choices along the way. Jessie, Lee, Joel, and Sammy might be occasional adrenaline junkies, even old hats at this sort of thing, but the experience of relentless observation and documentation has changed them, warped them, challenged their humanity. Garland goes to great lengths to document those challenges in ways both subtle and obvious. The film doesn’t choose sides, nor does it need to, because it’s not about the sides. It’s about the unflinching reality of such a moment, highlighted by the brief respites from the violence peppered throughout the narrative; that’s what makes Civil War an especially disturbing piece of thriller filmmaking.

Speaking about the film in a Q&A at SXSW, Garland noted that he wants Civil War to be a “conversation” more than anything, a film that asks questions about the real human costs of violence, how much we as human beings are willing to tolerate that violence, and what we might do if it came to our own backyards. The film does not have easy answers, but rather than making it seem shallow, its lack of clear moral coding instead offers us something more primal and more powerful. It’s a film about the open-ended question of how much humanity we as a species have left in us, and that makes it a provocative, thrilling monster of a movie that will sear itself into your eyeballs.

Civil War opens in theaters on April 12