A journey across a dystopian future America, following a team of military-embedded journalists as they race against time to reach DC before rebel factions descend upon the White House.

Alex Garland’s latest movie is his biggest to date and is highly likely to be his most divisive and most provocative. ‘Civil War’ is a dystopian action thriller taking place in a version of the United States in the future that is going through a Second Civil War, where Texas and California have joined forces in an alliance known as the Western Forces to take down the president (Nick Offerman). By design, very little context is provided for why the country is at war, with Garland choosing to thrust us into the centre of the action with his movie focusing less on the how and the why, and more on what happens after this situation kicks off. That makes for a riveting and thought provoking piece of cinema that stands up with the best I’ve seen so far this year.

We see this unfolding scenario through the eyes of a team of journalists who set off on a dangerous mission to head to Washington D.C. to attempt to interview the president before the secessionists (as the president calls them) can get to him first. The team is led by Lee Smith (Kirstin Dunst), a weathered war photojournalist who has become detached from the horrors that she shoots, alongside her colleague Joel (Wagner Moura). Along for the ride are the veteran Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), who works for a rival newspaper, and a young woman called Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), who has ambitions to follow in Lee’s footsteps.

As they attempt to track a path to D.C. from New York, their journey takes them into contact with various militias, army forces and refugees, with sporadic outbreaks of urban warfare and some horrific scenes laying bare the depravity of the rapidly escalating situation. These are scenes we won’t be unfamiliar with from TV newsreels but we’re used to seeing them from far flung lands and not in the Western world, so there’s a particularly potent and striking nature in the way Garland depicts an America at war with itself.

Our protagonists learn pretty quickly that their clearly marked press van is not a shield from the events unfolding and it isn’t always clear whether the people they come across are friend or foe, or even who they are representing with various splinter groups not being uncommon. Of course, there will be attempts to draw comparisons with modern politics and there are clearly influences at play here, but Garland is too smart a writer and director to make this a left or right wing thing and he uses the premise to show the base inhumanity that can affect anyone when society breaks down. I found it particularly effective that with a few exceptions, we aren’t clear which faction the people our protagonists encounter are representing (or if they are even representing anyone other than themselves in some cases) – in many ways this makes the movie even more threatening and unsettling.

It is a very well shot and well-acted movie, with some neat nods to ‘Apocalypse Now’ with helicopters soaring over the natural landscape of forestry and lakes, and supporting performances that leave a disturbing mark from the likes of Jesse Plemons who is truly scary (as you may have guessed if you saw the trailer). It is all anchored superbly by Kirsten Dunst who is as good as she’s ever been in the leading role, moving from mentor to young Jessie, to mentored from Sammy – her increasingly troubled reactions to what she encounters are all the more powerful for the way Dunst has built up Lee as a highly experienced, tough journalist who has seen it all before. And yet, she hasn’t. The journey has a defined end destination in Washington D.C. and we will get there, but it still has to nail the ending, and nail it ‘Civil War’ does. I will say no more.

‘Civil War’ is an ambitious, purposely challenging and provocative movie, and I wish we had more directors like Alex Garland willing to make them. A shame if he holds true to his stated plans to revert to writing only shortly after this, but if he does, this is a striking calling card to close out on.

Rating: 4/5

Directed By: Alex Garland

Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Nelson Lee, Evan Lai, Sonoya Mizuno, Karl Glusman, Jefferson White, Jin Ha, Jesse Plemons and Nick Offerman

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt17279496/