The title “Civil War” may conjure mental images of combat galore, pulse-pounding action sequences, and glorious scenes of battle and valor. Alex Garland’s new film has some of these things, but your heart is less likely to be jolted by action than it is to be slowly cranked to a frantic pace by the unrelenting tension that is laid thick across the entire runtime.

The majority of _Civil War_ is a road movie. Lee (Kirsten Dunst) is a war photojournalist who is traveling from New York City to Washington, D.C. with fellow journalists Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) and Joel (Wagner Maura), along with a young upstart photographer, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny). Years into an American civil war, parts of the United States are desolate, dangerous places; of course, these are the parts that the group must pass through. Lee and Joel are intent on interviewing and photographing the President (Nick Offerman) before the conflict comes to what they believe is its inevitable end with his execution. With a pretty on-the-nose deadline of July 4, the clock starts clicking.

Interestingly, this film shies away almost completely from political conversations surrounding the nuances of the larger conflict. The provocative title and concept evokes our national anxiety, particularly in a contentious election year, but then subverts what we expect from it in a fascinating way. We hear snippets of background, like a disbanded FBI and the “Antifa Massacre”, but generally speaking, it’s not about who did what to start the war — instead, it’s about the war already in progress, and how it has devastated the country. Rather than investigating the division between Republican and Democrat, Garland (ironically, a British filmmaker) is much more interested in the human response to war. The film is a series of vignettes illustrating this point as the journalists come across various set pieces throughout their journey to D.C. In Pennsylvania, a small group of men have taken command of a gas station and string up looters in the car wash; in West Virginia, an entire town is going about their business as though the war is not happening; and in what is undoubtedly the most tense sequence in the film, just outside of Charlottesville, VA, our group is held up by several nationalist soldiers digging a mass grave filled with those they deem un-American.

Alex Garland creates an interesting take on the idea of an American civil war by examining it through the lens of a group of journalists. Rather than an extravaganza of CGI battles, this begs for a much more grounded and practical approach to the conflict, which is exactly what we get. It puts the disquieting notion of what a war-torn United States could look like front and center without gratuitous spectacle to cushion the blow. I couldn’t help but reflect on the way the 2023 Academy-Award-winning documentary _20 Days in Mariupol_ made me feel; I was deeply and profoundly disturbed by that film, but months later, I am able to mentally demarcate those events and images in Ukraine as being halfway across the globe. I am safe from them. _Civil War_ forced me to consider: what if they weren’t, and I wasn’t?

With _Civil War_, Alex Garland has reached into an all-too-plausible future and pulled out a nauseatingly anxious portrait of an America that has fallen. The public discourse surrounding this movie is undoubtedly hurtling towards contentious debates, and with intentionally vague in-text politics, it’s relatively easy for almost anyone to claim that this film justifies their current political ideology and intolerances; one can readily adjust who is “us” and who is “them”. This dichotomy sounds divisive, but if the sides are so easily characterized as one or the other, doesn’t that actually mean that they’re much closer than you’d think?

In investigating our differences, Garland has made a poignant argument — and perhaps a desperate plea — that Americans are, maybe, more alike than we are different.