That old political reprimand “Have you no decency?” has lost its force. Politicians and media folk show no compunction about lying and tyrannizing, which is how we get Alex Garland’s shameless new movie Civil War. You can’t trust Garland, one of the least of the demi-Kubricks. His topical subjects are less outré than Yorgos Lanthimos’s; plus, he’s less of a craftsman than David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, or Jonathan Glazer. Yet, in Civil War, Garland tries for visionary virtuosity, faking rawness and sensationalism, all to predict America’s collapse. Designed to be fun, it is, instead, offensive.

Garland’s story doesn’t examine America’s gnawing antagonisms, or admit how they’re based in socialist, anarchist agitation. Yet he’s on to something: His heroine, Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), is a celebrated war photographer who joins a crew of journalists embedded by the military as it tracks a protest/raid in Washington, D.C. This isn’t prescient, it merely exploits the January 6 riot (although Garland avoids any scrutiny of the “insurrection” hoax that is gradually being exposed and debunked). Whether out of naïveté or partisanship, Garland suspects that the media are to blame for how we got to a place of national disunity. For British-born Garland, America is both a punching bag and a test site for global anarchy.