Whatever you expect from an Alex Garland movie, he always gives you something else. Civil War is something else again: a thought experiment about journalistic ethics, set in a future United States, yet reminiscent of classic movies about Western journalists covering the collapse of foreign countries, such as The Year of Living Dangerously, Salvador, Under Fire, and Welcome to Sarajevo.

How utterly bizarre, you might think. And in the abstract, it is bizarre. But Civil War is a furiously convincing and disturbing thing when you're watching it. It's a great movie that has its own life force. It's not like anything Garland has made. It's not like anything anyone has made, even though it contains echoes of dozens of other films (and novels) that appear to have fed the filmmaker's imagination.

Specifically, and most originally, Civil War is a portrait of the mentality of pure reporters, the types of people who are less interested in explaining what things "mean" (in the manner of an editorial writer) than in getting the scoop before the competition, by any means necessary. Whether the scoop takes the form of a written story, a TV news segment, or a still photo that wins a Pulitzer, the quest for the scoop is an end unto itself, and it's bound up with the massive dopamine hit that that comes from putting oneself in harm's way. The kinds of obsessive war correspondents who rarely come back to their own countries don't care about the real-world impact of the political realities encoded within the epic violence they chronicle, or else compartmentalise it to stay focused.

The main characters of Civil War are four journalists. The film introduces them covering a clash in New York City between what appear to be police forces from the official government and violent members of the opposition (we have to infer a lot because Garland drops you right into the deep end). Kirsten Dunst plays Lee, a legendary white female photojournalist in the mold of her namesake Lee Miller. She's partnered with a South American-born reporter named Joel (Wagner Moura). Both work for Reuters news agency and are fond of Sammy (veteran character actor Stephen McKinley Henderson), an older African-American journalist who writes for “what’s left of the New York Times,” as Joel puts it; he walks slowly on a cane, definitely a liability when covering protests and battles.

The group gains a fourth member, Jessie (Cailee Spaeny, the title character of Priscilla), a kind of junior version of Lee who idolises her. Jessie charms the hard-drinking, on-the-prowl Joel and ends up joining the trio as they drive to Washington, D.C. in hopes of interviewing the president (Nick Offerman) before he surrenders to the military forces of something called the WA, or Western Alliance. The WA consists of militias from California and Texas (with secondary support from Florida, which is apparently a different separatist group that shares the WA's values).

If you had to make a list of what Civil War is trying to do, "diagnosing what ails the United States of America" might not crack the Top 5. But if you pay attention to what the movie is actually doing rather than cherry picking elements that validate whatever take you brought in with you, it won't be easy.

As far as "future shock" goes, Garland, an Englishman, isn't cynically avoiding specifics. He's burying the text under subtext, in the name of creating a compelling but credible experience, until said text explodes through the screen via Jesse Plemons, who has a cameo as a soldier who might or might not be a Western Front officer but is surely a parasite on the remnants of the body politic. This soft-voiced, smirky hellion interrogates the terrified group of journalists (which consists of two white women, a native-born Black man, and a South American emigre, plus an Asian-American and a Chinese immigrant who joined them on the road) with all the delicacy of a racist white cop for kicks.

Experience the movie as sort of picaresque narrative consisting of set pieces that test the characters morally and ethically as well as physically, from one day and one moment to the next. Suffice to say that the final section brings every thematic element together in a perfectly horrifying fashion and ends with a moment of self-actualisation that you’ll never be able to shake.