Civil War

 

Writer / director Alex Garland relies on the audience's familiarity with societal divisiveness to provide the backdrop for his intense and visually stunning apocalyptic odyssey Civil War.

Set in the not-too-distant future -- maybe just months away -- Civil War follows a quartet of combat journalists (Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson and Cailee Spaeny) as they race against the clock and the deterioration of law and order to make it from New York City to Washington, D.C., where rebel forces are descending on a totalitarian regime, headed by a populist, clueless president (Nick Offerman) who has turned the military against American citizens.The reporters must take a circuitous route through a mix of bombed-out urban devastation and rural detachment.

Audiences are invited to fill in the movie's gaps with whatever narrative they like but to keep their eyes and ears open for the mayhem and the carnage, which is unending. I trust Garland understood the dysphoria of the landscape he was creating; government and rebel combatants are indistinguishable. War obliterates the distinction between the good and the bad. Members of the press are marked with reflector vests that are no protection from the barrage and they succumb to their worser instincts, too.

And in that is the real power of Civil War -- the focus on the role of the press to capture what is happening. Steely nerves. Unswerving eyes. But also, and most disturbingly, a gradual moral decay that turns them into agents of spiritual decline. This becomes chillingly apparent in the movie's breathless last reel.