I walked out of Civil War (2024) with a pit in my stomach and dust in my lungs, like I’d just returned from the front lines myself. Directed with chilling precision by Alex Garland, the film drops us in a version of the United States that looks hauntingly familiar but broken in all the ways we’ve quietly feared. There are no grand political expositions here, no convenient villains, no sides begging for moral alignment. Just fragments—of cities, of families, of ideals—shattered under the weight of something we thought could never really happen here. It’s not a movie about how we got to this point, but what it feels like to survive it.
At the heart of the film is Lee, a seasoned photojournalist played with understated grit by Kirsten Dunst. Through her lens—both literal and metaphorical—we witness the unraveling of the American dream in real time. She’s not interested in taking sides, and that ambivalence, that weariness, becomes the film’s emotional core. Watching her maneuver through warzones that used to be suburban cul-de-sacs isn’t just surreal—it’s nauseating. There’s a scene where she quietly photographs the aftermath of a massacre in what was once a shopping mall, and it’s not just the image that burns into your brain—it’s her expression. Detached, exhausted, but still chasing the truth. And maybe that’s the real tragedy: when even the truth starts to feel futile.
The violence in Civil War is not stylized or cinematic—it’s procedural, intimate, and deeply American. There’s something uniquely disturbing about seeing apple-pie Americana twisted into kill zones. The film doesn’t revel in gore, but it doesn’t flinch either. What struck me the hardest was how normalized everything felt. Civilians stepping over bodies, militia groups rolling through neighborhoods like they were running errands. Garland seems to be asking: what does it take for a nation built on exceptionalism to implode? And the answer isn’t dramatic—it’s gradual. Unremarkable, even. That’s the scariest part.
Growing up outside the U.S., I used to watch American media with a sense of awe—like they had figured it all out. The freedom, the optimism, the moral clarity. But Civil War dismantles that illusion with surgical calm. It suggests, without sermonizing, that the very myths America exports are the ones that could blind it from seeing itself clearly. Yet, the film never becomes a political lecture. It simply observes. Maybe too closely. And in that observation, the audience is forced to confront a darker mirror.
What makes Civil War feel so urgent isn’t just the destruction on screen, but how close it brushes against current fractures. The polarization, the distrust, the media echo chambers—none of it feels speculative anymore. The movie doesn’t predict a dystopia; it renders a version of today, just a few steps further down the path. But amid the dread, there’s still a heartbeat: in Lee’s mentorship of a young aspiring journalist, in brief moments of solidarity among strangers, in the camera’s unblinking gaze. Cinematically, it’s stark and deliberate—shot with icy beauty, soundtracked by silence and explosions—and it leaves you asking not just what’s next, but what we’ve already lost.
