“Three hundred? Three hundred buys you a sandwich. We got ham or cheese.”

To crib from a popular internet meme with the kids these days, one doesn’t simply release a film titled Civil War in an election year where those two words have been cavalierly tossed about without expecting it to gin up some controversy. Have art and commerce become so intertwined that a very good filmmaker like Alex Garland actually wanted to make a movie that thought the more commercial route was in attempting to appeal to everyone? Not to say his past work wasn’t totally uncommercial, but he’s had no issue doing the divisive thing in the past.

He once made a kick ass action movie where Natalie Portman and a bunch of badass chicks with guns battled ManBearPig. It was also a pensive look at the meaning of existence that climaxed with, essentially, a modern dance number. He knows what it means to be uncommercial—his last film, Men, ended with a scene of body horror that will never be forgotten by the people who saw the film. He therefore could’ve only intended Civil War as a way to reach out to the widest swath of audiences across a country that’s noticeably divided over a lot at the moment.

The details of the titular battle being waged across America are kept elusive throughout so Garland can plant you with a quartet of photo journalists, the most impartial participants in any war. There’s Lee (Kirsten Dunst), the jaded veteran of many foreign wars whose violence she hoped to escape back in America. Along for the ride are her jovial and similarly jaded partner Joel (Wagner Moura), her fatherly and similarly jaded mentor Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), the amateur shutterbug who idolizes Lee but hasn’t been exposed to the horrors of an actual war.

They’re going to drive in a giant oval from New York City west to Pittsburgh before heading back south and east to arrive in Washington D.C via West Virginia. Their goal is to interview a President—played by a more heard than seen Nick Offerman—who is spending his third consecutive term in office under siege by the Western Forces, a secessionist block of states winning a mostly street level war against him in the streets of America. The journalists are doing their best to appeal to both sides in order to be the first to land in the nation’s capital on its birthday, July 4, and get that irresistible opportunity to photograph the long fabled overthrowing of the government.

The film’s greatest asset is its core quartet of actors. Dunst looks hauntingly at home in a character who has seen some things, while Moura brilliantly reveals the toll that playing both sides to get what you need takes on a good-natured man. McKinley Henderson once again demonstrates why he’s one of our finest character actors with a performance attuned to be a calming force in the midst of chaos. And Spaeny fulfills the promise she showed as the title character in last year’s Priscilla, she is indeed the real deal and sells her character’s predictably doomed journey to being like her hero.

It’s rather unfortunate that they are the only real lifeline for the audience, the only characters we’re able to engage with in more than one dimension. Everyone else is painted in broad strokes, with even the soldiers they embed with allowed to do little more than simply survive. Keeping things as unspecific as possible is the only way to ensure one doesn’t lose half the audience and Garland knows he’s only halfway across this tighrope. Too far into the center that it’s scary to commit to either side.

Civil War is also fairly unrelenting, stopping only briefly every twenty minutes or so to give the audience a chance to breathe and process. However, these respites from the film’s propulsive momentum increasingly don’t allow adequate time for the audience to process what’s happening. In fact, this seems to be Garland’s main goal as it also serves his own ends from a storytelling perspective. The fewer questions you’re asking in the moment, the more focused you are on surviving alongside our main characters.

The lack of details surrounding the conflict is a major double edged sword. On one hand, it allows Garland to make the film accessible to anyone anywhere on the political spectrum by not tying any of the events too closely to anything actually going on in the country. However, this also leaves the film feeling ultimately toothless, too scared to delve deeper into anything for fear it will alienate half the audience. It’s obvious that the film’s point isn’t necessarily the conflict, but rather the effects of the conflict on a wide variety of people.

As the film reaches the ends of its second act, Garland allows his protagonists to—quite literally in some cases—let out a primal scream of relief after the film’s most intense moment to that point. We then get a gorgeously shot scene of their car driving through a wildfire set to “Breakers Roar” by country singer, songwriter, and sometimes actor Sturgill Simpson. This is where Garland and cinematographer Rob Hardy make you glad you’re seeing the film in a theater with great picture and sound.

This allows the audience the slightest chance to refocus before the third act inevitably takes them into the heart of the conflict, downtown Washington, D.C. just outside the White House. In these moments, Garland touches the sublime and it only makes some of his unfortunately frequent “on the nose” moments stand out more.

Ultimately, Alex Garland achieves with Civil War exactly what he intended. A24 isn’t the kind of studio to pick a filmmaker they’ve given carte blanche in the past, to just turn around and give him a set of marching orders. This is why I’m inclined to think more favorably about this film, not because I was turned off by what it was, but rather that it wasn’t the film I would have liked it to be.

I wish this had some of the acidity of Ex Machina, because coupled with the dread inducing terror he perfected with Annihilation, it could’ve really taken the piss out of half this country. But that’s not the film Alex Garland wanted to make. He wanted to thread the needle; making warfare look terrifying in the streets of America, while also overcoming the notion that any film that shows war, glamorizes it in one way or another.

I think that makes this an admirable endeavor. I also thought it ultimately failed for its refusal to make any of the behavior on display meaningful, as we don’t really know which side wants what or why. The absolutely bone chilling scene with Jesse Plemons’ trigger happy unnamed soldier loses just a bit of its oomph when he’s kind of the only person allowed to be an absolute monster. And heaven help us that a certain segment of the population likely agrees with his definition of “an American.”

I think that Garland is ultimately letting down the audience members who recognize this character is already a monster before we ever see him use his gun. I also thinks he stages some of his best work to date, while simultaneously guiding four of the best performances of the year. I’m allowed to hold two notions of one film in my head at the same time. It’s the movie he wanted to make, and I’m glad he got to make it his way. Right now, in the moment of its theatrical release, I think it’s kind of missing the mark by more than a couple degrees.

20 years from now, provided we’re no longer ensconced by daily chaos, I might feel differently. But today, in mid-April 2024, I really hope it’s no more prescient of things to come than Mike Judge’s Idiocracy. We’ve got a couple hundred more years before things get that stupid around here, right?

Header image via IMDb