‘Civil War’ Director Alex Garland Isn’t Shocked by the Discourse

Between his zombie classic 28 Days Later, his unnerving AI drama Ex Machina, his eco-catastrophe epic Annihilation, and his toxic-masculinity nightmare Men, Alex Garland has proven himself the master of modern big-screen sci-fi and horror, all while exhibiting an enduring fascination with extinction-grade individual and social-order disaster. Nonetheless, he’s never plumbed such fears in as timely a fashion as he does with Civil War.

A near-future vision of America’s devolution into chaos, the English writer/director’s latest (April 12, in theaters) is a trip through a hellscape of ruined cities, fortified suburbs, and ravaged plains, all of them torn asunder by a conflict that Garland only explicates in hazy detail. The point isn’t the precise political machinations that led the United States into disrepair; rather, the focus is on the underlying forces of hatred, tribalism, greed, intolerance, and insanity that have corrupted the nation and its citizens beyond repair, leaving only wreckage in their wake.

Civil War embarks upon its journey through this terrifying wasteland by tagging along with celebrated photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst), her reporter partner Joel (Wagner Moura), wary media vet Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), and aspiring war correspondent Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) as they attempt to reach Washington, D.C., to interview the soon-to-be-deposed president (Nick Offerman). Pitstop after harrowing pitstop, skirmish after bloody skirmish, what they discover is a country rotting from the inside, and what Garland conjures are vistas of ruin and heartache that—like the photos that Lee and Jessie take, and are desperate to believe in as possible agents of change—are designed to terrify and enrage. Eschewing pedantic exposition in favor of formally daring apocalyptic mayhem and madness, it’s a blockbuster that’s both a dirge and a rallying cry, as sorrowful as it is nerve-racking.

Read more at The Daily Beast.