Civil War (2024) — ★★★

Directed by Alex Garland. Starring Kirsten Dunst, Wagner Moura, Cailee Spaeny, Stephen McKinley Henderson. 109 min.

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Alex Garland's "Civil War" is not interested in explaining how America tore itself apart. It doesn't care about your politics. What it cares about is four journalists in a car, driving 857 miles toward Washington D.C. while the country burns around them, and what that drive does to each of them.

The film opens with the President (Nick Offerman, smarmy and delusional) rehearsing a victory speech while the Western Forces — a Texas-California alliance that Garland wisely never over-explains — close in on the capital. From a pure monetary and military standpoint, that coalition makes sense, and the general audience can see it as clearly as any armchair strategist. Garland trusts you to accept the premise and move on. The war is the backdrop. The witnessing is the story.

Kirsten Dunst plays Lee, a veteran photojournalist who has spent her career documenting other countries' collapses and now watches her own. Dunst plays her as someone already hollowed out — the quiet shutter clicks, the steady hands, the flat affect when she reviews aftermath photos. Then there's Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), a young photographer who tags along against Lee's wishes. She's green and eager in the way that scares experienced people. She freezes when she should shoot, forgets to raise the camera when it matters, and hasn't yet built the calluses that let you photograph a wounded soldier's execution without flinching. Their dynamic is the film's spine, and both performances earn it.

Wagner Moura's Joel brings an almost manic energy as counterweight, and Stephen McKinley Henderson as Sammy — the aging journalist who still believes the work means something — gives the group its moral gravity.

We record so other people can ask.

That line sits at the center of every scene that follows.

What makes "Civil War" genuinely unsettling isn't the combat — though Garland shoots action with a documentary immediacy that puts you inside the press helmets. It's the spaces between. An untouched neighborhood where people still smile and chat while a war rages a few miles away. A store clerk who shrugs, "We try to stay out." A gas station where caution is literal and 300 dollars buys you a sandwich — 300 Canadian, specifically. The film's most disturbing sequence involves strung-up bodies, a car wash, and a man with a gun and a simple question, played by an uncredited Jesse Plemons with the calm of someone who has stopped seeing certain people as human. You'll know the scene when it arrives.

Garland understands that civil war wouldn't look like a movie. It would look like your JC Penney with a downed helicopter in the parking lot. Highways choked with abandoned cars. Familiar American scenery made alien by context. The production design sells this constantly, and the distance markers counting down to D.C. give the road trip a ticking-clock tension even in its quieter stretches.

The film doesn't preach, and some viewers will find that frustrating. It refuses to assign sides, explain causes, or moralize about who's right. But that restraint is the point — Garland made a film about what it feels like to document a country eating itself, not a polemic about why. For that specific ambition, it mostly succeeds.

★★★