Armageddon has seldom seemed so thrilling

Civil War

Cert TBC, 109 min ★★★★★

Dir Alex Garland

Starring Kirsten Dunst, Cailee Spaeny, Wagner Moura, Stephen McKinley Henderson, Nick Offerman, Jesse Plemons It wouldn’t be fair to describe Alex Garland’s new film as Apocalypse Now for centrists – even though for some of us that sounds like the movie of the year. But it certainly is a topical Heart of Darkness journey in which the darkness’s origins and aims are beside the point.

Though it might be about societal disintegration in a near-future US, Civil War is neither an anti-Trump exemplum nor an anti-woke one. Garland, the writer and director of Ex Machina, Annihilation and Men, is defiantly uninterested in taking a side. Rather, his film is about the business of side-taking itself, and where our growing mania for doing so leads.

It opens in chaos: beyond the concrete perimeter of the president’s White House bunker, the breakaway forces of California and Texas march on Washington, while Florida toys with a secession of its own. Whatever prompted these defections is left unexplained, which is a smart move: if given a rationale, we’d only end up siding with or against it. Instead, Garland wants us to ponder what his film blasts at us with tension and style: a vision of a self-inflicted, and ultimately also self-willed, national collapse.

Fortunately, he gives us an expert to take our cue from. Grippingly played with battlescarred detachment by Kirsten Dunst, she is Lee Smith, a seasoned photojournalist. She’s clearly modelled on her namesake, Lee Miller – and in case we miss the reference, it’s pointed out by aspiring snapper Jessie, played by an exceptional Cailee Spaeny.

Soon, the two are driving from

New York to Washington (while avoiding the fighting) to interview the president in his Colonel Kurtz-like outpost. Also on board are Lee’s colleague Joel (Wagner Moura) and Stephen McKinley Henderson’s reporter Sammy.

Civil War moves in ways you’d forgotten films of this scale could – with compassion for its lead characters and a dark, prowling intellect, and yet a simultaneous total commitment to thrilling the audience. Each leg of the journey toggles between pin-drop suspense and rivetingly frantic firefights, often staged with a mesmerisingly surreal edge. An encounter with two loyalist troopers distils the film’s point of view on points of view into a single nerve-splintering standoff: one man’s righteousness can be another’s psychopathy, and sometimes the only difference between them is your angle.

In cinemas from April 12

Taking cover: Cailee Spaeny and Kirsten Dunst as colleagues Jessie and Lee