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Review
Civil War, review: Alex Garland’s Apocalypse Now for centrists thrills at every turn
The Ex Machina director’s vision of an imploding America is neither anti-Trump nor anti-woke. Instead it’s as riveting as cinema gets
It wouldn’t be fair to describe Alex Garland’s new film as Apocalypse Now for centrists – even though for some of us, that sounds like the movie of the year. But it certainly is a hotly topical heart-of-darkness journey in which the darkness’s political origins and aims are virtually beside the point.
Though it might be about total societal disintegration in a very near-future version of the United States of America, Civil War is neither an anti-Trump exemplum nor an anti-woke one. And that lack of a clear-cut message is liable to cheese off all the right people (not to mention the left ones). But Garland, the writer and director of Ex Machina, Annihilation and Men, is defiantly uninterested here in taking a side. Rather, his film is about the business of side-taking itself, and where our growing mania for doing so ultimately leads.
It opens in chaos – familiar in ways, and all the scarier for it. The US President (Nick Offerman) is fumbling through a dry run for an emergency broadcast, while newsreel clips of rioters punctuate his ahs and ums. Beyond the concrete perimeter of his White House bunker, the breakaway forces of California and Texas march on Washington, while Florida toys with a secession of its own.
Whatever prompted these defections is left unexplained, which is a deeply smart move: if given a rationale, we’d only end up siding with or against it. Instead, what Garland wants us to ponder is what his film blasts at us with relentless and uncompromising tension and style: a vision of a self-inflicted, and ultimately also self-willed, national collapse.
Fortunately, he gives us an expert to take our cue from. Grippingly played with battle-scarred detachment by Kirsten Dunst, she is Lee Smith, a seasoned photojournalist who honed her craft in foreign war zones. She’s clearly modelled on her namesake, Lee Miller – and in case we miss the reference, it’s pointed out by Jessie, an aspiring snapper played by an exceptional Cailee Spaeny, of Sofia Coppola’s Priscilla, whom Lee bumps into while covering a military-civilian fracas.
Soon, the two are making the 857-mile drive from New York to Washington (fighting means they have to avoid the direct route) in order to interview the President in his Colonel Kurtz-like outpost. Also on board are Lee’s colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), and Stephen McKinley Henderson’s Sammy, a newspaper reporter of the old school – who, even mid-Armageddon, sports tailored shirts with monogrammed cuffs.
Civil War moves in ways you’d forgotten films of this scale could – with compassion for its lead characters and a dark, prowling intellect, and yet a simultaneous total commitment to thrilling the audience at every single moment. Each leg of the journey toggles between pin-drop suspense and rivetingly frantic firefights, often staged with a mesmerisingly surreal edge. And the action is often intercut with Lee and Jessie’s photographs of it, creating uneasy syncopations in the bloodshed, as well as space for us to mull the moral murkiness of that classic centrist fallback: standing back and not getting involved.
A siege at a ramshackle Winter Wonderland is essentially Full Metal Jacket’s Battle of Hué crossed with the Glasgow Willy Wonka Experience: in other words, unnerving squared. But it’s a fraught encounter with two loyalist troopers, one played by Jesse Plemons in cherry-red sunglasses, that feels like the scene everyone will rave about afterwards. Here, Garland boils down his film’s point of view on points of view into a single nerve-splintering standoff: one man’s righteousness can be another’s psychopathy, and sometimes the only difference between them is your angle.
Cert 12A, 109 mins. In cinemas April 12