Alex Garland is back two years after the polarising Men (2022) with his safest movie yet, which only begins to sound ironic when you consider the nature of its subject. Civil War is inherently a story of division, but despite its provocative premise and election-year release, the latest from the acclaimed director of Ex Machina (2014) is an aggressively conventional genre exercise that repels any allusion to real-world political fault lines and, accordingly, the spectre of potential controversy. That a moral panic similar to the one which circled Joker in 2019 has formed around this film says more about the shrill tenor of contemporary media discourse than it does about the quality of Garland’s ideas. Embedding us in a group of battle correspondents at the tail end of a domestic conflict that has splintered America into opposing regional factions and paramilitary forces, Civil War strives for objective neutrality—a commendable (and commercially prudent) stance—but winds up myopic instead. 

The motivations of this war’s various sides are poorly defined for viewers, just as they remain immaterial to the goals of our dispassionate protagonists. “We record so that other people ask,” veteran journo Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) tells the idealistic rookie (Cailee Spaeny) she meets en route to photograph the president (Nick Offerman), before secessionist armies overrun the capital. Along for the ride are adrenaline junkie Joel (Wagner Moura) and grizzled old-timer Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson). The composition of Garland’s cast for his gender-flipped sci-fi thriller Annihilation (2018) signposted the thematic significance of an ecosphere that rearranges familiar elements into novel forms; if Civil War has a comparable aim, it’s to prescribe intergenerational cooperation as an antidote to chaos. 

Save for fleeting mention of citizen-dispensed fuel vouchers and the depreciation of the U.S. dollar, the movie contains few worldbuilding dimensions beyond the task at hand and never digresses from it long enough for these details to become anything more than scattered pit stops. Early comparisons to Apocalypse Now (1979), whether they sprang from overzealous marketing or online hyperbole, have inadvertently done the film a disservice. Besides a few idiosyncratic needle drops, there’s little reason to mention this straightforward action drama alongside Francis Ford Coppola’s sprawling, bacchanalian nightmare comedy.

Leaving the nature of the conflict’s origin and warring ideologies ambiguous, while in theory complementary to the professional mindset of Lee and her colleagues, strips the violence of stakes. That, too, is part of the film’s point—an ethos neatly summed up by a combatant scoping out his anonymous adversary: “Someone is trying to kill us; we are trying to kill them.” Perhaps by omitting context, Garland is trying to indict the present, as if to argue that the film’s events are a logical progression of the current moment and therefore do not require footnotes. But the slapdash approach he takes toward every other aspect of the film suggests this framework was chosen out of expedience more than fidelity to journalistic ethics. Besides, mapping some of this dystopia’s political minutiae certainly wouldn’t have inhibited empathy toward reporters who, presumably, know a thing or two about the topic they’re risking their lives to cover.

This is a movie born of and into a polarised reality about which it has nothing to say, other than a cautionary word to the wise that it can happen in your backyard too. Considering the film’s aversion to modern parallels (save for a head-scratching reference to an “Antifa massacre”), the comparisons to Apocalypse Now, a scathingly satirical, expressly political takedown of American foreign policy, seem even more baseless. Is telling this sort of speculative story in a complex way impossible without resorting to partisan mudslinging? Michel Franco’s fantastic New Order (2020) proves otherwise.

The limited ambition evinced by the screenplay is also apparent visually. The fourth feature-length collaboration between Garland and cinematographer Rob Hardy is, if nothing else, an earnest love letter to photojournalism. Banter over shooting technique and optimal ways of developing images on the move make for some of its better moments, which is why it’s a shame the movie relies so heavily on shaky close-ups that diminish the production’s scale, in addition to lighting that flattens shadow and detail. Detours into a sequestered town and an abandoned circus tease a stranger, grander film, but the cinematography and production design lack the vision to make these sequences any less aesthetically nondescript than what precedes them.

Neither intimate enough to be a compelling drama nor comprehensive enough to blueprint civilisational collapse, Civil War is focalised through the frustratingly narrow scope of a rifle rather than the expansive lens of a photographer’s camera.

Civil War releases in Australian cinemas on April 11.

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Ronald Meyer is the co-host of No Pun(dit) Intended and a past contributor to Collider, Next Best Picture, Gold Derby, and High on Films.