Civil War

April 26 – 30

7 pm nightly
1:30 Sunday Matinée
2024 – Action / SciFi
14A — 1h 49m

From filmmaker Alex Garland comes a journey across a dystopian future America, following a team of military-embedded journalists as they race against time to reach DC before rebel factions descend upon the White House. Civil War moves in ways you’d forgotten films of this scale could – with compassion for its lead characters and a dark, prowling intellect, and yet a simultaneous total commitment to thrilling the audience at every single moment. The premise is a perfect opportunity to take a cold, hard, genre-inflected look at the American experiment’s current slouching toward self-destruction.

The movie is about as apolitical as a story set during a modern American civil war can be. It’s a character piece with a lot more to say about the state of modern journalism and the people behind it than about the state of the nation. It’s almost perverse how little Civil War reveals about the sides of the central conflict, or the causes or crises that led to war. This isn’t a story about the causes or strategies of American civil war: It’s a personal story about the hows and whys of war journalism — and how the field changes for someone covering a war in their homeland instead of on foreign turf.

Civil War is more about why war correspondents are drawn to the profession than about any perspective on present American politics. And it’s a terrific, immersive meditation on war journalism. Lee and her colleagues are presented as half thrill-seeker adrenaline monkeys, half dutiful documentarians determined to bring back a record of events that other people aren’t recording. They’re doing important work, the movie suggests, but they must be more than a little reckless both to choose the profession and to return to the battlefield over and over.