For a film its distributor describes as an “adrenaline-fueled thrill ride,” Alex Garland’s Civil War is surprisingly mellow and dialogue-driven for its first hour. Set in a war-torn America, the picaresque A24 road movie owes its stoicism to Kirsten Dunst’s weary photojournalist, Lee, who is numb to the horrors she witnesses en route to Washington, D.C. It’s the near future, and the retail apocalypse has brought crashed helicopters to the parking lot of your local JCPenney. Secessionists are also closing in on the nation’s capital as Lee and other members of the free press drive there to interview the three-term president before he’s deposed.
Armed gas station attendants, torture victims hanging in a car wash, militiamen executing hooded captives: these things don’t faze Lee. It’s not until an hour in, when Dunst’s real-life husband and Fargo costar, Jesse Plemons, makes an uncredited appearance, that Lee and her fellow journalists feel in true peril. This is where Civil War’s deliberately muddy politics fall away as it unearths prejudices beside a mass grave, confronting the characters and the audience with an overt threat that demands a non-neutral response. While it tests the limits of Lee’s unflappable field demeanor, the scariest scene in Civil War shows where the bodies are buried, both literally and figuratively.
