'Civil War' is a doomsday thought experiment — that could have used more thinking

Transcript

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. In the new movie "Civil War," which opens in theaters this week, Kirsten Dunst plays a seasoned war photographer covering a brutal conflict that has divided the United States in two. It's the latest picture written and directed by English filmmaker Alex Garland, known for his mind-bending thrillers "Ex Machina" and "Annihilation." Our film critic Justin Chang has this review.

JUSTIN CHANG, BYLINE: Releasing a movie called "Civil War" in this election year is certainly one way to grab headlines. Surprisingly though, Alex Garland's ambitious new thriller largely sidesteps the politics of the present moment. It wants to sound a queasy note of alarm, as if the democracy doomsday scenario it's showing us could really happen. But it's hard to buy into a premise that feels this thinly sketched. The story takes place in a not-so-distant future, where Texas and California have improbably joined forces and seceded from the U.S. Florida, not to be outdone, has also broken away on its own. The president, a third-term tyrant played by Nick Offerman, has responded by calling in the troops and launching airstrikes on his fellow Americans, plunging the country into poverty and lawlessness. Garland keeps a lot of the details vague. He's less interested in how we might have gotten here than in how we would respond. To that end, he focuses on characters whose job it is to document what's happening.

Kirsten Dunst gives a strong, tough-minded performance as Lee, a skilled photojournalist who's covered conflicts all over the world and is now confronting this nightmare on her home turf. She's headed from New York to Washington, D.C., where many expect that the war, which has been raging for some time, will end with a showdown at the White House. Accompanying Lee on this dangerous journey are two seasoned colleagues Joel, a wily reporter played by Wagner Moura from "Narcos," and Sammy, a veteran political writer played by the always outstanding Stephen McKinley Henderson. Per movie convention, there's also an inexperienced young outsider, Jessie, an aspiring war photographer played by Cailee Spaeny, the star of last year's biopic "Priscilla." Not long into their trip, the four journalists stumble on a tense scene at a gas station where three armed men are holding two other men captive. The journalists get away without incident, but Jessie is deeply disturbed by what she's seen.

(SOUNDBITE OF FILM, "CIVIL WAR")

CAILEE SPAENY: (As Jessie) I didn't take a single photo. I didn't even remember I had cameras on me, like, oh, my God. Like, why didn't I just tell him not to shoot them?

WAGNER MOURA: (As Joel) They were probably going to kill them anyway.

SPAENY: (As Jessie) How do you know?

KIRSTEN DUNST: (As Lee) He doesn't know, but that's besides the point. Once you start asking yourself those questions, you can't stop, so we don't ask. We record so other people ask. You want to be a journalist? That's the job.

MOURA: (As Joel) Hey, Lee.

DUNST: (As Lee) What?

MOURA: (As Joel) Back off.

DUNST: (As Lee) What am I saying that's wrong?

MOURA: (As Joel) I'm not saying it's wrong, she's just shook up.

STEPHEN MCKINLEY HENDERSON: (As Sammy) Lee doesn't understand shook up.

DUNST: (As Lee) Whoa, I'm not being protective of her? You're the idiot who let her in this car.

CHANG: In time, Jessie gets better at her job. More than that, she becomes hooked. The movie is partly about the addictive thrill of thrusting a camera into a war zone, but it's also about the trauma and desensitization that these photographers experience as they put their emotions aside and do everything they can to get that perfect shot. "Civil War" itself has been quite strikingly visualized by the cinematographer Rob Hardy and the production designer, Caty Maxey. They show us an America that looks both familiar and unfamiliar, resembling the battlefields we've seen in footage from other conflicts in other places. There are surreally grim images of bloodstained sidewalks, bombed-out buildings and a once busy highway where rows of abandoned cars stretch for miles and miles.

Garland has a real feel for post-apocalyptic landscapes, as we saw in his script for the zombie thriller "28 Days Later." In the movies he's directed since, like the brilliant "Annihilation," he's shown a real talent for building suspense and anxiety. But as stunningly detailed as "Civil Wars'" dystopia is, for moment to moment, I hardly believed a thing I was seeing. As Lee and her pals inch closer to D.C., they go from one violent set piece to another, each one calculated for maximum terror. There's a nasty ambush at a Christmas theme park display in the middle of nowhere, followed by a chilling encounter with a gun-toting, racist psychopath played in a mordent touch by Jesse Plemons, Dunst's off-screen husband. The result is more of a button-pushing genre exercise than a serious reckoning with the consequences of the movie's premise.

By the time the characters arrive at their destination just in time for a daring raid on the White House, "Civil War" feels ever more like an empty stunt. A thought experiment that hasn't been especially well thought out. If there's one thing that keeps you watching, though, it's Dunst's performance as a battle-scarred professional doing her job under horrific circumstances that she's too numb to feel horrified by. As she showed in her great performance in Lars von Trier's "Melancholia," there's something about Dunst that's particularly well suited to apocalyptic material. I wish her better vehicles than "Civil War" in the future, but it's gratifying to see her anchor a major movie regardless. She's an actor I'd follow to the end of the world and back.

DAVIES: Justin Chang is a film critic for The New Yorker. He reviewed the new film "Civil War." On Monday's show, "Diarra From Detroit" is a dark comedy series described as a homegirl whodunit that takes the classic TV murder mystery to unexpected places. We'll talk with star and creator Diarra Kilpatrick about how she blends dark humor with very real issues like the decline of industry towns, friendship, betrayal and police corruption. I hope you can join us.

(SOUNDBITE OF HELEN SUNG AND HARLEM QUARTET'S "SUNGBIRD")

DAVIES: FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our senior producer today is Roberta Shorrock. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham, with additional engineering support from Joyce Lieberman, Julian Herzfeld and Al Banks. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Ann Marie Baldonado, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Therese Madden, Thea Chaloner, Susan Nyakundi and Joel Wolfram. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. For Terry Gross and Tonya Mosley, I'm Dave Davies.

(SOUNDBITE OF HELEN SUNG AND HARLEM QUARTET'S "SUNGBIRD") Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.