Kirsten Dunst in Alex Garland’s dystopian war film

The details of American politics do not interest Alex Garland Civil war.

Despite the controversy already raised over its supposed prescience, this disturbing film by the British director does not predict a future based on the country’s current two-party system. Garland is far more concerned with America’s exceptionalism and its belief in its own safety than with executive instability. He is fascinated by how factions provoke conflict and how no country is immune to the consequences of violence.

Premiere at SXSW, Civil war It explores these preoccupations from the perspective of a group of journalists as they chronicle life in their war-torn country as they travel to Washington, D.C. We meet the crew in New York, where they are covering a tense standoff between civilians and the police. Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) – a conflict photographer whose success and abrasion is modeled on famed World War II correspondent Lee Miller – works quickly with her Reuters colleague Joel (Wagner Moura) to capture the scene before the spreading violence bubbles over.

When it finally happens, the couple meets Jesse (PriscillaCailee Spaeny, a freelance photographer, is harmed in an altercation instigated by the police. The young documentary filmmaker is keen to express her admiration for Lee after the veteran reporter saves her life and gifts her with a neon press jacket. Later that evening, Jessie, through a winning combination of will and charm, convinces Joel to let her go with her on a road trip to D.C. And this is actually after they agreed to let Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), The New York Times Journalist, join them despite the risks.

The group hit the road the next morning despite Lee’s protests about Jesse’s inclusion. (She, to some extent, doesn’t want to be responsible for an outsider or an amateur.) Their roughly 800-mile trip to D.C., where Joel and Lee are promised an interview with the president (Nick Offerman), takes the reporters through the ride. Hostile areas, military checkpoints and temporary refugee camps.

These scenes of America as an active war zone are some of them Civil warThe most powerful images. In a subversive move, Garland, again partnering with DB Rob Hardy, documents these conditions in the far-flung reality style found in American films about international regional conflicts. the Previous machine And Extermination The director combines images of displaced Americans, armed resistance fighters, and other evidence of war with familiar shots of the country’s pastoral landscapes to create a sense of destabilization.

As the crew drives through southern New York, they come across abandoned and blown-up cars on highways lined with vibrant green trees. The football field has now been turned into an aid camp, adding a layer of sadness to the messages scrawled on the walls (“Go Steelers,” one says) that remind us of life before. For example, a winter wonderland filled with Santa Claus statues turns into an active conflict zone, and a small town that seems eerily distant from the devastation taking place everywhere else turns out to be guarded by an armed militia.

These sequences along with other nostalgia-laden gestures—the use of country music needle drops, for example—effectively recast American iconography, implicitly questioning the nation’s tendency toward self-myth. Garland also weaves in shots of Lee and Jesse along the way, a technique that examines not only the ethics of war photography but also American expectations of what such images should be. As for the issue of race – the organizing principle of the nation – Civil war Nods but does not face explicitly.

All of these ideas, considerations, and questions—what it means to be American is one that the film asks again and again—are experienced by the viewer on a largely intellectual level. Garland has always been a director of big ideas, and Civil war She is no exception when it comes to this ambition. But he also seeks an intimacy here that his screenplay doesn’t quite achieve. Despite strong turns from the actors, the American journalists at the heart of the story feel emotionally barren about their country’s disintegration, and their motivations for doing this work feel similarly distant. Of course, war increases cruelty, distortion and trauma, however Civil war It assumes that journalism, in this distant future, can always see the forest for the trees. The film would be wise to avoid grand, melodramatic gestures, but characters who share stories perhaps conjure a better sense of their depth.

Dunst makes Lee an incredibly compelling character, as her faith and ability to endure the demands of the job slowly crumble over the course of the film. But the lack of detail keeps her character in the shadows. The same goes for Jessie, whose youth provides insight into her risky behavior, and Joel, who is Latino and from Florida (a state that here has its own faction separate from the Texas-California alliance).

With the precision and length of the intense battle scenes, it’s obvious Civil war It acts as a clarion call. Garland wrote the film in 2020 as he watched the gears of America’s mythical self-exceptional machine shift, plunging the nation into a nightmare. With this latest film, he raises the alarm, asking less about how a country can walk blindly toward its own destruction, and more about what happens when it does.