Alex Garland’s Civil War isboth the greatest and most underrated American war film since Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. Interestingly, both films have been criticised for a perceived neutrality – Bigelow for her depictions of extraordinary rendition without any overt moral commentary, Garland by keeping the two parties in his civil war somewhat ideologically unclear. All we know, as the President, played by Nick Offerman, opens the film with an address to the nation, is that Florida and California have combined to form the Western Forces, and are attempting to recruit the Carolinas to storm the Capitol and form a secessionist government. The dissonance of Florida and Californa aligning seems intentional, making it difficult to situate the conflict in traditional ideological terms, a fact that seems to have caused critics consternation, precluding, as it does, a clear or easy point of identification.

This confusion seems intentional, however – part of Garland’s broader project to evoke an American public sphere that has become so hypermediated that it has collapsed simplistic distinctions between right and left wing philosophy. Like Apocalypse Now, the conflict in Civil War has sprawled far beyond the original crisis, and branched out into fringe skirmishes where little other than survival seems to be at stake: “Someone’s trying to kill us, we’re trying to kill them!” Garland also addresses the role that hypermedia plays in this ideological collapse by framing the opening sequence with the President in a grainy, glitchy, staticky manner, evoking all the different ways it has already been recirculated and remediated at the instant of its dissemination. By contrast, the narrative revolves around a pair of photojournalists, Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and Joel Martinez (Wagner Moura), who make their way from New York to Washington D.C. in an effort to condense the conflict to its most essential images – and, in doing so, to finally draw its ideological coordinates into clear focus. Joining them is Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a veteran journalist, and Jessie Cullen (Cailee Spaeny), an aspiring photojournalist. Between them, the four travellers represent a generational cross-section of the ways in which we mediate our political lives and realities.

That premise works brilliantly with Garland’s visual style, as Lee’s photographic eye, in particular, becomes a cipher for his incredible imagistic instincts. Journalists are perceived as enemy combatants in D.C. and shot on sight, and treated with mistrust in most other parts of the United States, which imbues each image with an urgency and anxiety, especially since they so often focus on images of death and desuetude. Civil War unfolds as a string of these images, or tableaux, which grow lusher and lusher as the four characters move towards Charlottesville, the last major threshold before the warzone of D.C. At the same time, images feel peculiarly heavy and plastic here, partly because digital technology is largely removed from the equation. With only an intermittent phone signal most of the time, the journalists have to develop their images by hand, although interestingly they still use an app on their phone to assist with this, albeit an app that doesn’t require any connectivity and isn’t connected to an external cloud or storage device. Navigating the politics of the present, Civil War suggests, means occupying this messy zone between digital ethereality and analog materiality, between the effervescence of ideologies on social media and their embodied reality in the physical world. In Civil War, ideology itself feels elusive and oppressive at once.

No surprise, then, that Jessie, the young photojournalist, reflects that she has never felt more scared of nor more alive to the power of images once they finally arrive at Charlottesville – and these images are all the more resonant for the fact that most of them occur in transit. For Civil War is beautifully attuned to regional and textural Americana, along with the militaristic disillusionment that already feels incipient in great chunks of roadside America. Even as we don’t hear much about the origins of the conflict, it seems to emerge, mercurially and inevitably, from a general decay of public space and infrastructure – from all the malls, stadiums, carparks and business centres that have been left behind by the receding tide of the good life. Lee’s best photograph doesn’t include people at all but merely their uncanny trace, in the guise of a helicopter that has crash landed into an abandoned Sears’ car park.

These tendencies in the film render the climactic scene at the Capitol eerily and resonantly bathetic. While Lee does end up getting her perfect shot, it costs her her life, an event that is barely registered, let alone recorded, by the soldiers and photojournalists around her – least of all by Jessie, whom Lee is trying to save when she perishes. Likewise, Joel’s photograph of the assassination of the President is too ideologically overdetermined to bring the film to a neat conclusion, especially once Joel’s lips curl up in pleasure at the sight, our first and only hint as to his partisanship, although what this facial gesture signifies remains ambiguous. Instead, Civil War ends with a still photograph of the victory, that develops, then overexposes, and finally fades into nothing. At a time when Donald Trump has managed to harness the same disaffected young voting bloc that Barack Obama made his own, and when the desire for radical change seems to be traversing traditional party lines, it’s a sobering vision of the longing for certainty amidst chaos, and the rapidity with which that certainty can evaporate.