Category Archives: Thrillers

Bloodied bodies dangle from the roof of a roadside car wash. Bullets clatter off the stairwells of a suburban office park. The Lincoln Memorial erupts in a nova of flame. What bites deepest in Alex Garland’s Civil War isn’t its narrative, but its imagery—the transformation of heartland America into a nightmarish near-future war zone.

That might surprise audiences looking for a high-concept, #resistance action flick. The premise—contemporary America wracked by a second civil war—seems urgently political, even overtly partisan. But Civil War is not that movie. Indeed, it’s almost eerie how hazily its central conflict is described.

In one sense, Civil War is the precise inverse of The Purge. The premise of the latter franchise—every year, all crime becomes legal for twelve hours as a sort of societal blowoff valve—is brilliant and fascinating. But despite this hook, that series has never served up anything other than the most generic horror tropes. Civil War leaves its premise murky and underdefined, but leans hard into everything else.

Based on the trailers, you might’ve expected Civil War to be an action movie. It’s more like The Last of Uswithout zombies, a long road odyssey across a grisly-yet-strangely-beautiful apocalyptic America. Photojournalist Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst) and colleague Joel (Wagner Moura) aim to snag a final interview with an embattled president (Nick Offerman) in Washington D.C., as forces from the Western Front—an ambiguously allied Texas/California coalition—close in. (The country is balkanized even beyond that, but the “Florida Alliance” is referenced merely in passing.) Aspiring photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) and veteran journalist Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) tag along for the ride.

The beating heart of the film is the people and situations they encounter along the way—from trigger-happy war criminals dumping bodies into a mass grave, all the way to a beautiful West Virginian downtown trying hard to pretend the conflict isn’t happening. Their journey is slow, elegiac, brutal, but never once dull. The driving scenario is simply too compelling for that.

Thematically, Civil War is something of a Rorschach test. For the most part, it’s politically noncommittal (Offerman’s villainous President is in his “third term” and has a few Trumpian rhetorical tendencies, but that’s about it). One can easily interpret it as a story about mass violence as such, about political polarization, or even the brutal and fragmented nature of modern warfare.

But to my mind, the most interesting reading of Civil War is as a story about journalism. In recent years, the contemporary mass media has faced a generational conflict, between grizzled professionals committed to the old ideal of “objectivity” and a more socially-conscious younger set. Something reminiscent of this plays out onscreen, with all its associated moral tensions. Lee is hardened and stoic, capable of passively photographing a burning man in a gasoline-soaked tire, but it is clear that her work still takes an emotional toll. For her, journalism is not primarily about social change; it is about distance and discipline. On the other hand, Jessie begins in naïve optimism, passion, and emotional investment, but soon embraces an aggressiveness more like Lee’s. And ultimately, Civil War concludes this tale on a brutally ambiguous note: Jessie metamorphosing into her reluctant mentor, leaving open exactly what she may or may not be willing to do for the one perfect shot.

Hence, Garland suggests, a paradox. Effective work as a journalist requires critical distance from one’s subject matter, but the process of formation required to attain such detachment is, in essence, moral cauterization: to be really good at the job means to be something less than human (or maybe, better, “less than humane”). Something like such an act of self-renunciation makes sense in the context of soldiering: lethality requires, at some level, vilification of the foe. But that sacrifice is performed in service of a clearly defined end (service to one’s country). Can the goal of “sharing information for its own sake” ever justify such a “distancing” from moral concern? American journalism hasn’t yet figured out how to answer this question, and Garland doesn’t attempt to do it here. But it is a problem well worth posing.

In the end, Civil War isn’t really a mainstream film—it’s far closer to arthouse fare—and won’t be to every viewer’s taste. But those willing to fully commit to Garland’s haunting vision will encounter something increasingly rare, in an age of CGI spectacle: a waking nightmare that looks and feels all too real. And it may be the smartest film I’ve seen this year.

I’ll admit it: for the last several years, I deliberately ignored all news surrounding “Indiana Jones 5” because I didn’t want to believe it was actually happening. For all its faults, 2008’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull ended on a (mostly) perfect note: Indy and Marion reunited and married, with a son Indy never knew he had. A follow-up installment with an even older Indiana Jones seemed like a terrible idea. And then, of course, I couldn’t ignore it anymore: trailers started dropping in theaters and an official release date hit the calendar. Naturally, I couldn’t say no forever.

Color me pleasantly surprised. At bottom, Dial of Destiny is nowhere near the finest entry in this series. But it manages to be the finale I didn’t know I wanted.

We open with an extended fight sequence on a train set in 1944, featuring a digitally de-aged Harrison Ford trying to wrest the Holy Lance from Nazi hands. As it turns out, the train is carrying an even more valuable relic: the Antikythera Mechanism, part of a legendary time dial that can supposedly identify rifts in the time-space continuum. An ever-skeptical Indy secures the dial piece and stows it away.

Flash forward to a grumpy, seventy-something Indy living in Manhattan in 1969, as Apollo 11 astronauts first set foot on the Moon. Now estranged from Marion and in the midst of retiring from the classroom, he’s on the verge of turning into a dusty relic himself. But when his goddaughter Helena Shaw (Phoebe Waller-Bridge) turns up in search of the dial, Indy finds himself thrust back into action. And as usual, it’s a race against time: “ex”-Nazi scientist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen) also wants the dial for his own nefarious purposes, and will kill to get it. Cue various vehicle chases, subterranean explorations, and supernatural shenanigans.

Taken purely as a summer blockbuster, Dial of Destiny has plenty of issues. Ford isn’t given enough to do, frequently making him feel like a tagalong in an adventure that’s supposed to be his. Waller-Bridge is a talented actress, but her character here is extraordinarily annoying—and much of her performance seems like a too-on-the-nose setup for a Disney+ spinoff series of her own. (Frankly, it seems like the studio wanted to do an Indy-Lara Croft crossover event but couldn’t get the rights.) And at two-and-a-half hours, this movie is way too long.

The action is iffy, too. This time around, Steven Spielberg isn’t behind the camera, and director James Mangold (responsible for, among other well-received films, the Old Man Wolverine adaptation Logan) has a noticeably different cinematic style. In particular, Mangold is fond of panoramic shots, which don’t serve his action scenes well: they lack the tightly cut, taut energy that characterizes the best Spielberg fights (just rewatch the truck chase from Raiders of the Lost Ark or the tank battle in Last Crusade).

Sometimes, though, Mangold’s distinctive approach is an asset—like Logan, Dial of Destiny is self-consciously an ending for the Indiana Jones character, and the emotional beats of the film have a gently elegiac tone that I’m not sure Spielberg would’ve pulled off.

I was a little ambivalent about the movie’s conclusion after leaving the theater, but the more I thought about it, the more I agree with Mangold’s storytelling instincts. Dial of Destiny’s central thematic hook is this: a hero whose life has been defined by his relationship to the past is forced into a climactic reckoning with it. And what Mangold rightly grasps is that this question has been looming over the entire Indiana Jones franchise, whether or not it’s been directly posed as such. “Riding off into the sunset” (Last Crusade) or “heading out for more adventures” (Kingdom of the Crystal Skull) just aren’t quite the right endings for this character. They can’t be, because they don’t actually conclude Indy’s arc in any meaningful way.

Trying to ignore this question is rather like wanting to go back to a version of James Bond “before” Casino Royale, before the question of Bond’s relationship to women and to authority was asked and answered meaningfully. The character would feel flat, unreflective, somehow less human. Likewise, Dial of Destiny asks its audience to undertake a deeper and more meaningful appraisal of the franchise as a whole—to see a consistent thematic through-line within the prior films, a through-line that properly has to reach an endpoint. That is exactly what the best sequels need to accomplish (and what so many fail disastrously at).

All of this culminates in one of the most strikingly life-affirming conclusions I could’ve imagined. Throughout the film, Indy finds himself brooding over why his life—lonely and aloof as it may be—is worth living, and in a culture increasingly willing to embrace “medical assistance in dying” (often given the ghoulish acronym MAiD), it feels remarkably countercultural for Dial of Destiny to so thoroughly reject that nihilism. The story of Indiana Jones now feels finished in a way it didn’t before, and this is a triumph all its own.

Dial of Destiny won’t be remembered as iconic (or, conversely, as chaotically out-there like Kingdom of the Crystal Skull). But if—like me—you grew up with Indy, then you owe it to yourself to see the adventure’s end. This coda is about as good as it could’ve hoped to be.