Civil War ditches present politics in favor of gripping action and emotion

polygon.com:

A version of this review ran in March 2024 in conjunction with the movie’s original coverage embargo. It has been updated and republished for the theatrical release.

In an era of divisive, high-stakes U.S. politics, it isn’t surprising to see so many people online responding to the entire concept of Alex Garland’s Civil War as if it’s inherently toxic. Set on and around the front lines of a near-future America broken into separatist factions, Garland’s latest (after the fairly baffling fable-esque Men) looks like a timely but opportunistic provocation, a movie that can’t help but feel either exploitative or far too close to home in a country whose name, the United States, sounds more ironic and laughable with every passing year.

And yet Garland says that America’s present widespread divisions aren’t really what Civil War is about. The movie is about as apolitical as a story set during a modern American civil war can be. It’s a character piece with a lot more to say about the state of modern journalism and the people behind it than about the state of the nation.

It’s almost perverse how little Civil War reveals about the sides in its central conflict, or the causes or crises that led to war. (Viewers who show up expecting an action movie that confirms their own political biases and demonizes their opponents are going to leave especially confused about what they just watched.) This isn’t a story about the causes or strategies of post-united America: It’s a personal story about the hows and whys of war journalism — and how the field changes for someone covering a war in their homeland, instead of on foreign turf.

Lee Miller (Kirsten Dunst) is a veteran war photographer, a celebrated, awarded, deeply jaded woman who’s made a career out of pretending to be bulletproof in arenas where the bullets are flying — or at least being bulletproof long enough to capture memorable, telling images of what bullets do to other people’s bodies and psyches. Her latest assignment: She