“What’s so civil about war, anyway?”
– Axl Rose, “Civil War”

“What kind of American are you?”
-Jesse Plemons, “Civil War”

Warning: This review contains spoilers for the film “Civil War.”  

For a movie released during an election year about secessionist forces marching on Washington D.C. to dethrone a fascist 3rd-term president, “Civil War” is a weirdly apolitical flick. Alex Garland’s latest directorial effort combines elements from dystopian thrillers, social satires, and road movies to create a kind of subdued Frankenfilm, which eschews broad-strokes political points about Antifa and Trump in favor of brutal reflections on the nature of violence, and what happens when images of war – burning cars, dissidents hanging from telephone poles, and presidents begging for their lives – come home.

“Civil War” follows four journalists – Joe (Wagner Moura), Lee (Kirsten Dunst), Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) – on a bloody odyssey from New York City to D.C. to interview the president, who’s held up in the White House as secessionist forces from California and Texas move eastward. It’s never directly explained what kicked off this iteration of the American Civil War, but sound bites and bits of conversation give the audience some idea. The president, in his third term, has disbanded the FBI, presumably overstepped his power, and launched airstrikes against Americans, and now western forces are on their way to take him out.

Joe wants to interview the president before the end of the war – it’s not entirely clear what he hopes to gain from this final interview, and it’s even less likely that he and Lee will make it into the White House alive. “They shoot journalists on sight,” warns Sammy, an elderly New York Times journalist who tags along for the ride. Lee, a photojournalist with ample experience in war zones, is accompanied by Jessie, a young would-be photographer who talks her way into the press van, a battered white Ford Excursion with “Press” spraypainted on the side.

The trip from NYC to D.C. is lengthened by blocked and destroyed interstates, so the foursome is forced to go west, through Pittsburgh, and back through West Virginia to the nation’s capital. On the drive out, Garland depicts an eastern seaboard rocked by conflict – cars on fire on the highway, military checkpoints, and tracer fire lighting up the night sky above decaying Rust Belt towns. Militants and insurgent groups abound; at one point, Lee and Jessie are shown two dying looters hanging from their wrists in an abandoned carwash. The militiaman, a lanky Pennsylvanian, agrees to pose with the looters for Lee’s camera as a shocked Jessie watches.

It’s this “on-the-road” segment that allows Garland to really flex his creative muscles. The central conceit of Texas and California, two diametrically opposed states, teaming up to take out the president for the unacceptable crime of … disbanding the FBI? It wears a little thin. But scenes of hometown violence, refugees in converted football stadiums, and looters in American military uniforms are shocking enough to make viewers consider what might actually happen if the states went at it. It wouldn’t be pretty, and it certainly wouldn’t be glamorous.

Garland also subtly pokes fun at his main characters, all of whom are proud of their careers in photojournalism. Joe starts out the movie as a cool, slightly unhinged Hunter S. Thompson type, jumping headfirst into gunfights between insurgents and government forces, and laughing at summary executions of captured soldiers. But when Sammy is hit with a stray and killed on the way into D.C., Joe breaks down, his tortured screams drowned out by the sound of approaching Chinook helicopters. He’s a hypocrite – a fan of violence when he’s wearing a Press helmet, but much less so when it affects someone he actually cares about.

By the end of the movie, however, he’s back to his bad old self, getting a final one sentence interview with the president before western forces soldiers cap the commander-in-chief. “Please don’t let them kill me,” the president blubbers, in response to Joe’s demand for a quote. “Yeah,” the reporter chuckles. “That’ll work.”

Lee is more of a voyeur in disguise, who masquerades as a sensitive journalist. “I blame myself,” she laments to Jessie about her previous career as a war journalist. “I thought with every picture I sent home, I was saying, ‘Don’t do this.’” But with every picture she takes abroad – a man on fire, a soldier covered in blood – she’s contributing to the American appetite for violence at home. And by the end of the film, she’s made Jessie into her disciple, to the extent that the final shot of “Civil War” is of the young journalist snapping a picture of the president’s execution behind the desk of the Oval Office.

At one point, Lee’s ethos is made very clear, when Jessie expresses concern about whether the two looters hanging by their thumbs in the car wash are going to survive. “Once you start asking yourself those questions, you can’t stop,” Lee advises. “So we don’t ask. We record so other people ask.” Lee and Joe are possessed by this sick detachment from reality disguised as social concern, which the viewers are left to digest for themselves – is this dispassionate picture-taking actually helping communicate information to readers and viewers? Or is it just contributing more out-of-context violent grist to the content mill?

“Civil War’s” apolitical nature cuts both for and against it. It’s not easy to map figures and characters in this movie onto political figures and events in real life. Garland makes references to things audiences will easily get – the front lines in the final battle are in Charlottesville, Lee and Joe talk about “Portland Maoists” and the “Antifa Massacre” – but it’s mostly surface level. Even Nick Offerman’s president isn’t really a stand-in for Trump, Biden or even Obama. (Keen-eared viewers might catch some Trumpisms in the president’s opening speech, like “Some are saying,” “the greatest victory in military history.” I tried to convince a friend that the bit about disbanding the FBI was a reference to Trump firing James Comey, but he thought it was a “bit of a reach.” If there’s a president the film wants you to think of, I’d argue that it’s The Donald, but only sort of.) The murky origins of the war make it hard to pin down any political motivations behind “Civil War,” which keeps the audience from being distracted from Garland’s main points about journalistic neutrality and violence. (Personally, I wouldn’t necessarily trust a Brit to make any salient arguments about American politics anyhow.)

But it still feels, at least a little bit, like a missed opportunity. Or a bait-and-switch. To drop a movie called “Civil War” months before a presidential election that will almost certainly be hotly contested, and then not taking the opportunity to say something direct about American politics? It’s a strange move, to say the least. Garland’s kind of centrist mealymouthed answers in interviews contribute to the “both-sides” image that he’s trying to evoke in “Civil War,” but at a certain point, it does feel like a cop-out. (It’s worth nothing that this isn’t the first time he’s written or directed a property that, by all rights, should be political but isn’t. 2012’s “Dredd,” adapted from the 2000 AD comic book series that HEAVILY satirizes police violence and government overreach, was written by Garland to be a straightforward cop shoot-em-up. A great shoot-em-up, that everyone should watch, but still lacking in the black political comedy that made the comic so interesting.) Overall, the points he makes about American violence on our own soil are well-taken, but to make them in a movie about civil war without really saying anything about the roots of American partisanship and civil discontent? To put it bluntly, it seems like a waste of an interesting concept.

With that said, there are some standout performances in “Civil War” that make the movie fun to watch. Wagner Moura brings a sense of demented glee to shootouts between government troops and Boogaloo Bois, and Stephen McKinley Henderson classes the whole affair up (and reminds me that he should have been in “Dune 2.” RIP Thufir Hawat, we didn’t deserve ye.) An uncredited Jesse Plemons delights in a short scene as a truly psychotic militiaman in heart-shaped sunglasses, and the whole second act is worth it for him alone.

“Civil War’s” action sequences are razor sharp as well – there’s a particularly well-done scene early on in the film where government forces have Hawaiian-shirted insurrectionists pinned down in a building, and when the bullets are flying, it feels real. And overall, the whole thing looks good. Garland’s always been a good director and writer of action (see “28 Days Later” and “Dredd” for proof) and here, with his hand on the helm, “Civil War” is fun to look at.

I went in to the theater with a Coors tallboy and an expectation for some heavy-handed political satire. What I got instead was a meditation on the nature of violence, set against a backdrop of a collapsing empire. In some ways, it was a wasted opportunity, but in other ways, it made me contemplate the country I’ve grown up in, and consider – what happens when it breaks apart?