"You never know what’s coming around the next corner!" veteran newsman Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) cautions novice photographer Jessie (Priscilla’s Cailee Spaeny) in writer/director Alex Garland’s Civil War. It’s advice worth heeding as they – together with veteran photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and cavalier reporter Joel (Wagner Moura) – take an arduous and perilous journey through a future America in brutal conflict with itself.
Yet Sammy’s words also serve as an admonition from Garland to the disunited States of today: a land whose partisan politics and entrenched ideological positions might indeed spawn a nightmare scenario akin to the one his film envisions.
