States of Mind: The Fractured Psyche of a Dying Empire in Civil War

“Do you want the truth, or do you want the story?”

Alex Garland’s Civil War is not just a dystopian projection it is a slow, suffocating unraveling of conscience framed through a war-torn America and the eyes that dare to look at it. It opens like a memory that's all blurry, unkind, already mid-collapse. There’s no grand announcement of chaos, no dramatic descent into conflict. The world is already gone. And what’s left behind is documentation of a brutal, aching kind of witnessing.

At the centre of this odyssey is Lee, played with a hollowed brilliance by Kirsten Dunst. A war photographer with dust on her boots and detachment in her eyes, Lee doesn’t speak much, but her silence carries the weight of every child she’s photographed in rubble, every body her lens has made immortal. She is not heroic. She is not even steady. She is just still because she has to be. Across from her, almost shadowing her, is Jessie who is a young, wide-eyed aspiring journalist who is still tender with belief. Jessie wants to matter. She wants to be where things happen, wants to understand the war. But understanding is not what war offers, it only gives you exposure. And exposure, in this case, becomes a kind of moral erosion.

There’s a moment that lingers long after the film ends, where Jessie asks, “How do you choose?” She’s referring to photographs about what to shoot, when to shoot, when to look away. But that question becomes the spine of the film. In a war with no clear villains or victors, how does one choose where to stand? What to preserve? What to condemn? The answer never arrives. Because the Civil War is not about clarity. It is about living in blurred lines. And Garland makes you sit in that discomfort deliberately, intimately, unrelentingly.

The film offers no exposition. No real political backdrop. No voiceover or scrolling text to tell you what happened to America. And that’s its quiet genius. We don’t need to be told. We’ve seen enough headlines, enough real-world premonitions. The fragmentation is familiar. It is the logical conclusion of what happens when language, truth, governance, and morality decay in tandem. Garland doesn’t world-build he lets the world rot. And you feel it. Not in spectacle, but in texture. In the roadside executions passed without comment. In the blank stares of civilians holding rifles. In the casual silence that follows the death of another driver, another friend, another witness.

There is an aching psychology at play beneath the dust and the noise. War here isn’t just violence it’s a haunting. A slow deterioration of the self. Joel, the veteran journalist in the group, has the humor of a man who’s photographed his own undoing. Sammy, their driver, isn’t brave, but he still feels and that’s more dangerous. Jessie flinches less and less as the film goes on, and by the end, it’s not clear whether she’s grown stronger or just gone numb. But it is Lee who is most devastating to watch. There’s a moment near the climax where she turns her camera away. No words. No declaration. Just refusal. And in that refusal, a kind of redemption. Or maybe surrender. It's hard to tell the difference anymore.

The cinematography is ghostly. Wide shots of quiet cities, abandoned highways, empty eyes. The score trembles rather than swells. There’s no glory here. Just fatigue. Just documentation. And isn’t that the whole tragedy? That in the end, all we can do is document. All we can do is survive long enough to remember, and then hope memory doesn’t eat us alive. “You think when you photograph something, it stops,” Lee murmurs, at one point. “But it doesn’t. It stays in you. Forever.”

Civil War isn’t here to comfort. It isn’t here to thrill. It arrives, like dusk, and settles in your chest like static. You don’t watch it you endure it. And when it’s over, you are left with a strange emptiness. Not because something was taken. But because something was named. The violence. The silence. The moral ambiguity. The complicity. The heartbreak. The fact that by the time the empire fell, its people were already ghosts.

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