'Civil War': Powerful depiction of combat on U.S. soil shocks the senses

In writer-director Alex Garland’s purely fictional, yet searing and brutal and highly charged dystopian “Civil War,” the United States of America are no longer united, and rebel forces have accumulated military-grade tanks, helicopters, Humvees and weapons. The nation is in danger of being in engulfed in the flames of a self-inflicted fire, and it is a shock to the senses to witness this madness.

So yes, this is a film sure to inspire much debate, and no doubt some will call it alarming in its prescience. I wouldn’t go that far; we are a nation deeply divided, but an actual, real civil war hardly seems imminent. Still, with horrific wars raging in other parts of the world, and with politically charged violence part of the fabric of this country, “Civil War” will hit home no matter where you live.

The script by Garland (“Ex Machina,” “Annihilation”) makes it clear we are in a parallel universe. This is not an anti-MAGA screed, nor is it an indictment of wokeness, whatever that means. In “Civil War,” California and Texas have seceded from the Union to form the Western Forces and are hell-bent on overthrowing an isolated and megalomaniacal third-term POTUS (Nick Offerman) who has disbanded the FBI and has authorized air and ground strikes to combat the rebels. (There are other insurrectionist factions, including one called the Florida Alliance. Chaos rules the day.)

The story of “Civil War” is told not via the politicians and the soldiers, but through the experiences of a group of journalists who have embarked on a perilous, perhaps suicidal mission to make their way to Washington, D.C., in what could be the final days of the war. Whereas the most memorable films about wartime correspondents (“The Year of Living Dangerously,” “Salvador,” “Under Fire,” “The Killing Fields”) have been set in foreign lands, what makes “Civil War” so jarring is that the scenes — of bombs going off in the night, of looters who have been tortured, of rebels summarily executing uniformed personnel, of refugees rioting, of piles of bodies in ditches — are taking place in New York City, in Pennsylvania, in West Virginia, in Virginia, or in the nation’s capital.

Kirsten Dunst delivers some of the most powerful work of her career as the battle-tested and world-renowned Reuters photojournalist Lee Smith, who wears the same stone-faced expression whether she’s pointing her lens at a man who is dying just a few feet away from her or “relaxing” in the obligatory Wartime Journalists Bar Scene we’ve come to expect in this genre. Lee and her working partner, the free-spirited and equally fearless Joel (Wagner Moura), embark on the extremely dangerous, 857-mile road trip in the hopes of somehow scoring an interview with the president. Also along for the ride: Lee’s mentor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a veteran journalist for the New York Times near the end of his career, and the fresh-faced and ambitious and highly naïve photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), who talks her way into joining them and serves as an obvious reflection of the younger Lee.

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“Civil War” delivers one piercingly effective sequence after another, with much of the action taking place in the blue-skied sunshine of beautiful days, making the violence all that more jarring. With the hand-held camerawork and the brilliant use of sound adding to the feeling of authenticity, Lee and her colleagues routinely risk their lives to get the picture, to tell the story to the world. Jesse Plemons has a memorably chilling cameo as a soldier wearing Elton John-type glasses who will gun you down on the spot if you give the wrong answer to the question, “What kind of American are you?” In another tension-filled scene, the group finds itself pinned down alongside two men who are engaged in a shootout with a sniper. When Joel tries to get some context, one of the gunmen tells him it comes down to this: He’s trying to kill us and we’re trying to kill him.

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So it goes in a story that plays as much like a horror film as a war movie. We don’t really know who’s on the “right side” in this horrific conflict; at times, we’re not even sure if the journalists are covering the good guys or the bad guys. Lee keeps telling Jessie it’s not their job to take sides or get emotionally involved; it’s their job to record history. This is a film that knows wartime journalism

Time and again, Garland gives us images of Americana in ruins. A football stadium is now a refugee camp. A Christmas-themed attraction has become a war zone. On a seemingly peaceful and unperturbed small-town Main Street, snipers can be glimpsed on the rooftops. The extended final sequence, with the Western Forces closing in on the White House, is brilliant and pulse-pounding, and will take your breath away. This is one of the strongest movies of the year so far.