The actress stars alongside Cailee Spaeny in the ‘Ex Machina’ and ‘Annihilation’ director’s latest feature about a group of journalists chronicling a violent conflict in the United States.

The details of American politics do not concern Alex Garland in Civil War.

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

The group hits the road the next morning despite Lee’s protestations over Jessie’s inclusion. (She, fairly, doesn’t want to be responsible for a stranger and an amateur.) Their roughly 800-mile journey to D.C., where Joel and Lee have been promised an interview with the president (Nick Offerman), takes the journalists through hostile tracts, military checkpoints and makeshift refugee camps.

These scenes of America as an active war zone are some of Civil War’s most potent images. In a subversive move, Garland, partnering again with DP Rob Hardy, documents these conditions with the distant vérité style found in American films about international regional conflicts. The Ex Machina and Annihilation filmmaker juxtaposes images of displaced Americans, armed resistance fighters and other evidence of war with familiar shots of the nation’s pastoral landscape to create a sense of destabilization.

As the crew drives south of New York, they come across abandoned and blown-up cars on interstates lined with vibrant, verdant trees. A football stadium is now an aid camp, which adds a melancholic layer to the graffitied messages (“Go Steelers,” one  says) that remind of life before. A winter wonderland dotted with statues of Santa Claus, for example, becomes an active conflict zone, and a small town that feels eerily distant from the destruction happening everywhere else turns out to be manned by an armed militia. 

All of these thoughts, considerations and questions — what does it mean to be American is one the film repeatedly asks — are experienced by the viewer on a largely intellectual level. Garland has always been a director of big ideas, and Civil War is no exception when it comes to that ambitiousness. But he’s also reaching for an intimacy here that his screenplay doesn’t quite deliver on. Despite strong turns from the cast, the American journalists at the center of the story feel emotionally sterile vis a vis the dissolution of their country, and their motivations for doing the work register as similarly remote. Of course war hardens, contorts and traumatizes, but Civil War presupposes that the press, in this distant future, can always see the forest for the trees. The film is wise to avoid big, melodramatic gestures, but characters sharing stories might have conjured a better sense of their depth. 

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

With the precision and length of its violent battle sequences, it’s clear Civil War operates as a clarion call. Garland wrote the film in 2020 as he watched cogs on America’s self-mythologizing exceptionalist machine turn, propelling the nation into a nightmare. With this latest film, he sounds the alarm, wondering less about how a country walks blindly into its own destruction and more about what happens when it does.