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This film provides one of the best depictions of war I have seen on screen for a while. It’s a very different movie but it is right up there with Saving Private Ryan and The Hurt Locker in showing all the tension, the fragile calm, the exhilaration and the devastation. Following a group of press photographers we really see the brutality, the inhumanity, the uncertainty, the fear and the tragedy of living and working in a country under fire. The aspect that this has over Spielberg and Bigelow’s celebrated movies though is that this is not depicting past or Middle Eastern conflicts. This is set now and the battle is raging in North America.

The fact that this is a fictional war steals none of its impact though, quite the contrary. Seeing the shootings, the explosions, the rolling tanks and the ground incursions, already so familiar from a selection of other war films, here in the settings familiar from a wide range of very different Hollywood movies carries a particular power (indeed these will be the areas people live in for a lot of the audience). As a viewer you are watching everything play out thinking how jarring it is because it surely couldn’t happen there but this is quickly followed by two other realisations. The first of these is that there a citizens in other parts of the world right now, in the Ukraine and Azerbaijan, and not so long ago in Croatia and Georgia, who probably thought the same thing. This is both sobering and creates a particular empathy. Even in the US, in January 2021 we already saw the capital being stormed in a way we wouldn’t have thought possible so the message here is definitely never say never. In fact you could read this whole thing as a warning of what could happen if Trump is re-elected and even though it is not stated if this is occurring under a Democratic or Republican government, he is going to hate this film. (He already thinks Hollywood has it in for him and he won’t like that one of the attacking districts here is California.)

There is something else in relation to this that hits home as well. I am sure it isn’t just me but I was put in mind of another time when people thought world events wouldn’t touch them. When Covid-19 was shutting everything down in China and South America there were those in Europe and the US who thought that same thing, that it couldn’t happen here could it? It couldn’t happen here. Could it?

As I say, this not being a real war doesn’t distance you, it actually brings you right in.

Alongside this, Civil War is a fascinating character study. We’ve seen journalists featured this way before, in The Killing Fields and Salvador to name just two, but this really examines what kind of person does this job. It is made clear that these players have a safe space they could go but they choose not to be in it. I started to understand the relationship the armed forces have with them too, the soldiers want the historical shot but they also really want the historical shot. There are four main press members here and each shows a different facet of the approach taken. It is interesting that the friend I saw this with kind of saw one of them as the villain of the piece; a callous young woman who would prioritise nothing over her own success. I didn’t see it this way but it is hard to deny that her actions lead to immense loss for others and certainly she is horribly hardened by the job. Played by Cailee Spaeny, she is very much being handed the torch by Kirsten Dunst’s senior reporter and it is amusing to see director Sofia Coppola’s first muse (in The Virgin Suicides) playing this role opposite her most recent (in Priscilla). Both women are excellent but I think it is ultimately Dunst’s movie. Kirsten Dunst is an actor I don’t think of often but prompted by this I put together a ranking or her ten best films (see it here) and I had trouble whittling it down. She has a brilliant career and this is possibly the best she has ever been. I’d like to see her recognised in the awards season next year but that will heavily depend on how America views this film, which is something I will watch with great interest.

It isn’t Dunst’s movie really though, it’s British writer director Alex Garland’s. This is only Garland’s fourth film as director and even though he first hit with the excellent Ex Machina, this shows a cinematic artist getting better and better. Civil War is probably his most mainstream work and while it doesn’t show the imagination of Annihilation or Men (this last one I didn’t love as much, it got too weird), there is still no compromise in his vision. The balance and pacing of the film is also excellent, the shot composition wonderful and the story and, as suggested, the characterisation brilliant. I hope he is garlanded (no pun intended but totally owned) too.

Civil War may divide people (see what I did there as well) but I thought it was tremendous. I certainly know which side I’m on even if this is something you never discover about the protagonists in the movie.

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The Ripley Factor:

Female war correspondents was something that became normal with Marguerite Higgins in WWII and since then we have had others like Marie Colvin, Christiane Amanpour, Lee Miller and Kate Adie, all of whom must have inspired Dunst’s Lee Smith to some extent.

Nonetheless this didn’t have to be a female character. The movie could just as easily centred on Wagnor Moura (who is also great in the film and should break right away from TV after this). The two key women in the movie are both formidable, real, flawed and brave without this consciously being a feminist narrative.