Civil War (2024)

Alex Garland's Civil War arrives as A24's most expensive production to date, a road movie through a disintegrating republic in which the factions are kept deliberately vague and the journalists are kept deliberately exhausted. The president is a third-term authoritarian. The secessionists are an unlikely alliance of California and Texas. The reporters want an interview and mostly receive a lesson in how little their profession can hold back. It is a war film without a thesis, which is both its discipline and its limitation. The camera watches, the shutter clicks, and the politics remain a haze of gunfire and improvised checkpoints.

The cast is diverse, and the film puts a woman at the center of its moral machinery: Kirsten Dunst's Lee is weathered, competent, and quietly maternal toward the younger photographer she mentors. That is a feminist gesture of the understated variety, present but not preached. Racial consciousness fares better. The ultranationalist militia burying civilians in a mass grave executes the Hong Kong journalists for not being native-born white Americans, and the scene lands with the blunt force of a Charlottesville reference. Elsewhere the film declines the progressive checklist entirely. There is no LGBTQ presence, no environmental subtext, no commentary on bodies or on the economic order. The gas station torturers and the looters are simply weather.

Notably absent is sermonizing. Garland trusts spectacle over speeches, and no character pauses to explain the nation to itself. There is no revision of the historical record here, only a projection forward, and the film resists the urge to lecture its audience into virtue. The result is a film that gestures at social consciousness without committing to an argument, which may be the most honest thing about it. We classify it accordingly: a tense, well-made object, ideologically slippery, and content to remain so.