Director: Alex Garland
Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Nick Offerman
Screenplay: Alex Garland
109 mins. Rated R for strong violent content, bloody/disturbing images, and language throughout.

I can’t believe this movie exists. Civil War is easily the most uncomfortable movie I’ve watched in quite some time.

Set some time in the future, the United States is deep into the Second American Civil War as multiple state factions plot to take control from the dictatorial President (Nick Offerman, The LEGO Movie), currently serving his third term. War photographer Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and her colleague Joel (Wagner Moura, Puss in Boots: The Last Wish) have teamed with a veteran reporter and another young photographer to travel to DC and interview the President before he is forcibly removed from office.

As a director, Alex Garland (Ex Machina) has been able to access a strong level of nihilism that tends to pervade each of his projects with a dour tone, and Civil War is very much the next tier of that journey. This is a very hard to watch film. While I expected that from the trailers, I didn’t expect to be so tense and anxious for the entire run time that I actually left the theater with a stomachache. It certainly won’t be a film for everyone, and I think that should be noted. It’s an extremely unpleasant film.

All that aside, it’s also an incredibly powerful and thought-provoking experience about the state of our society, unchecked power, political accountability, and the danger lying in our potential futures. There are so many lenses with which to view the events of Garland’s film that I feel each viewer will take something else away from it (Texas and California together?), and yet it never feels bloated, as full of its ideas as it is. It was a clever choice to reduce specific correlation between this film and the tense political climate of recent years. I feel like anyone from either political extreme could find something to connect with here.

Kirsten Dunst’s performance is the absolute standout here (though husband Jesse Plemmons certainly vies for the spotlight for his limited amount of screen time). Dunst’s work here is so reserved, made by specific tugs or twitches of the face, limited dialogue, and her stoicism in the face of unspeakable atrocities really shows how this job has forever altered her perception of reality. I should also mention the incredible work of Wagner Moura throughout the entire film, but there a few notable scenes that display his range, specifically as they get closer to DC and the reality of the situation finally sets in.

Garland uses a number of techniques in his directing arsenal that perfectly suit the story he’s telling. Under other circumstances, the uses of camera footage, shutter clicks, and focus wouldn’t work so well, but in the sense of war photography, it matches the tone and subject matter involving the distance between the photographer and their subject, and each picture that’s taken says as much about the cameraman as the subject.

One final note on the film’s musical selections: I can’t tell for certain, but it seems that songs were chosen for the film that seemed to evoke the kind of music popular in classic Vietnam war films. Nearly all of the musical cues in the film were ones I didn’t know, but they frequently had a similar musical cadence to a number of notable songs frequently associated with the Vietnam war, like Fortunate Son, but made today. It isn’t on-the-nose, but it works.

Civil War is a truly American horror tale. It severely affected me, and it’s not exactly a movie I’ll recommend to everyone, but if you saw the trailer and the very conceit interested you, then I’m confident that the film will have the impact you are looking for. This movie fan will certainly be discussing it for months to come, as I’m certain it will be one of the year’s absolute best.

4.5/5
-Kyle A. Goethe

For my review of Alex Garland’s Annihilation, click here.