Guerra Civil

The more arresting its doomsday images... the more Garland's war loses itself in a nonpartisan fog, a thought experiment that short-circuits thought.

In a hotly divisive, post Jan. 6 election year, Alex Garland embeds us with journalists, led by a wow Kirsten Dunst, covering a speculative second war between the states. The result is the most original and propulsively exciting movie of the year so far.

As laudable as numerous aspects of the production may be, Garland's Civil War remains a vexing mixed bag.

It's more a call for reflection, an attempt to put us in the shoes of others, than a warning - not an It Can Happen Here movie, but a Here's What It's Like movie.

Garland's movie is no more vital to the discourse than "The Purge," and is about 1% as entertaining.

Once you understand that Civil War isn't about what you think, you can appreciate it for what it actually is: a searing meditation on what happens when political orders collapse and violence takes on a sinister logic of its own.

Alex Garland's "Civil War" is essentially a horror movie, one in which the horrors feel uncomfortably close to home.

Civil War is here for the carnage, and Garland captures the chaos with an unflinching eye, just as his journalistic protagonists do.

The film, never as daring or nuanced as it needs to be, rests uneasily between Oliver Stone's provocative war correspondent movie Salvador and Gerard Butler's ballistic blockbuster Olympus Has Fallen.

[Alex Garland] knows how to tell a story but can't stick the ending. This flaw diminishes Civil War but it isn't a fatal blow. There's still enough captivating and disquieting material here to make the experience worthwhile.

Civil War is both a more ambitious picture and an act of grim entertainment. But it's also sodden with its own importance, as if it thinks it's saying something truly important -- something we don't already know -- about the real America.

Purposeful though it may be, Garland's squishiness can read only as a failure of nerve. A more successfully political movie wouldn't be so wary of aiming at real targets.

When the fire created by Civil War goes out, it's easy to feel you've been manipulated. Like a house was burned down to the ground just to provoke a reaction. Nothing more.

As a dramatic action film about journalists covering a war, this is good... But it's silly [to say it's not political].

Isn't Civil War conducting its own Turing Test? Only the examination isn't about determining whether a machine is capable of exhibiting human behavior… it's about whether a journalist is capable of exhibiting human behavior.

Alex Garland's film is a fascinatingly empty meditation on journalism and our political divides.

This may mark an intellectually leaner effort from the filmmaker, but there's still meat on the bone for the viewer to chew on. That is, if they can stomach anything after watching its brutal violence on American soil.

Clamorously making its claim on viewers' attention by subject matter alone, rather than by artistry or world view, the film is a kind of advertisement for itself.

Look at it as a movie for posterity, and it becomes a worthwhile movie to savor, but nothing else-and you'll survive. Admire Civil War as an amazing film of imagination and cinematic verve but nothing else-and you will, too.

It's very powerful.