Alex Garland’s Civil War puts a camera between the audience and a broken America. The film runs 109 minutes. It is a war picture, an action picture and a drama at once, and its tagline is blunt: “Welcome to the frontline.” That is the promise. The question is whether the film keeps it.
Trailer, via A24.
A Second Civil War, Fought From the Press Car
The premise is simple and close. A civil war has engulfed the United States. On one side is the authoritarian federal government, led by a third-term president. On the other are three secessionist movements, chief among them the Western Forces, a joint California and Texas breakaway. The president claims victory is near. Almost no one believes him. Washington, D.C. is expected to fall.
Garland wrote and directed. The cast is led by Kirsten Dunst as Lee, a veteran war photographer, and Wagner Moura as Joel, her Reuters colleague. Cailee Spaeny plays Jessie, a young photojournalist who talks her way into their car. Stephen McKinley Henderson is Sammy, their mentor from The New York Times. Nick Offerman plays the president. Sonoya Mizuno also stars.
The plot follows the group from New York City to Washington. Their aim is an interview with the isolated president before the rebels take the capital. That is the whole engine of the film. A road trip through a country eating itself.
The Gas Station, the Car Wash, the Sniper
The set pieces come in a fixed order, and each one raises the price of the trip.
After a suicide bombing in New York City, Lee and Joel meet Sammy, who tries to talk them out of the drive and then joins them anyway, bound for the front line at Charlottesville, Virginia. The next morning Lee finds that Joel has let Jessie come along. Leaving the city, the group stops at a gas station held by armed men. At a car wash nearby, Jessie sees those men torturing two people they call looters. One guard follows her back. Lee ends the standoff by taking his picture, posing him with his victims. Jessie then berates herself for freezing.
The next day the group documents an assault. Secessionist militiamen take a loyalist-held building. Jessie photographs the secessionists executing prisoners. Lee sees her talent and starts to mentor her. That sequence is the film’s spine. A young photographer learns what the job costs in the same hour she learns she can do it.
A Refugee Camp, a Town in Denial, a Christmas Fair
Garland keeps moving. The journalists spend a night at a refugee camp. They pass through a small town where residents, under watchful guard, try to live as if the war were not happening. Then they are caught in a sniper battle in the remains of a Christmas fair.
Two more names matter here. Jesse Plemons, Dunst’s real-life husband, appears uncredited as Wyatt, a racist ultranationalist militant leader. Jared Shaw, Justin Garza, Brian Philpot and Tywaun Tornes play the Western Forces soldiers who storm the White House under a sergeant.
The film premiered at South by Southwest on March 14, 2024. A24 released it in the United States and Entertainment Film Distributors handled the United Kingdom, both on April 12, 2024. Principal photography began in Atlanta, Georgia, in 2022 and moved to London later that year. The budget was $50 million, which made Civil War the most expensive film A24 had made at that point. It grossed $127 million.
Release and Reception at a Glance
| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| 2022 | Principal photography begins in Atlanta, Georgia |
| 2022 | Production moves to London |
| March 14, 2024 | Premiere at South by Southwest |
| April 12, 2024 | U.S. release by A24; U.K. release by Entertainment Film Distributors |
Reviews were generally positive. The audience score sits at 6.8 out of 10 from 4,558 votes. That split is the useful number. A film about a country that cannot agree has landed with critics and with a paying crowd at roughly the same temperature.
What the Road Trip Actually Argues
Here is where Civil War earns its keep, and where it does not.
The best decision Garland makes is refusing to explain the war. There is no lecture on the casus belli, no map with arrows, no scene where a character tells us how it started. We get a third-term president, three secessionist movements, and a country where a gas station needs armed guards. The restraint is the point. Civil wars are not understood by the people inside them. They are survived in fragments.
The second-best decision is the camera. Lee and Jessie are photographers, not narrators. Their job is to look. Garland builds the film around that. The car wash scene is the cleanest example: Lee does not shoot the guard, she shoots the guard, and the photo is what saves her. The film knows that an image is a weapon and a shield and a compromise all at once.
Where it thins out is the politics. The Western Forces are California and Texas together, which is a pointed and clever choice, and the film does almost nothing with it. The president is despotic, we are told, and Offerman plays him as a man in a room. That is all we get. For a film this committed to the texture of a collapsed republic, it is oddly incurious about the republic.
And the ending. The journalists drive to Washington to interview the president before the rebels arrive. That is a strong, clean goal. The film spends its middle acts on detours that are individually strong and collectively baggy. The refugee camp, the town in denial, the Christmas fair — each is a good scene. Together they dilute the clock. A 109-minute film should not feel like it is killing time before the last twenty minutes.
The Cast Carries What the Script Leaves Loose
Dunst is the reason to watch. Lee is jaded, and Garland writes her jaded, and Dunst plays the weariness without playing the attitude. She is a professional doing a job in a place where the job has stopped making sense. When she starts mentoring Jessie, the film finds its emotional line.
Spaeny is the other half of that. Jessie is the audience. She is scared at the car wash, ashamed of being scared, and then competent in a way that frightens her more. Spaeny plays the shift without announcing it.
Moura’s Joel is the weakest of the three leads, mostly because the script gives him the least to do beyond driving and arguing. Henderson’s Sammy is the film’s conscience, and Henderson makes him warm rather than noble, which is harder.
Plemons arrives late and uncredited as Wyatt, and he is the most frightening thing in the movie. That is not a small compliment. A single scene from a militant leader does more to sell the war than any amount of exposition could, and Garland is smart enough to keep it short.
Our Verdict on Civil War
Civil War is a good film that could have been a great one, and the gap is discipline.
What works is the premise, the camera-as-weapon idea, and the three performances at the center. Garland has made a war movie that refuses the usual comforts — no righteous side, no clear cause, no speech that explains it all. The gas station and the car wash are the kind of scenes that stay with you. The sniping at the Christmas fair is the best-staged action in the film.
What does not work is the middle. The road trip has too many stops and not enough clock. The politics are gestured at rather than examined, which is a strange choice for a film this interested in how a country comes apart. And the president, the object of the entire journey, remains a blank.
The 6.8 out of 10 is fair. It is a film worth your time and not quite worth the hype that met it. Garland aimed at something enormous and hit something real but smaller. The camera work is the argument. The script is the limit.
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