There’s the movie the marketers are selling… and there’s Alex Garland’s new film.

The combined Western Forces of California and Texas are bearing down on the President of the United States (Nick Offerman), and it’s widely believed his third term in office is coming to an abrupt end. Seasoned photojournalist Lee (Kirsten Dunst) and her partner Joel (Wagner Moura) make a bold decision: risk life and limb traveling from New York City into Washington D.C. and score the interview to end all interviews. With veteran reporter Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson) hitching a ride to the capital outskirts and would-be shutterbug Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) inserting herself into the dangerous opportunity, they plot a route through rural backroads and closed-off communities to minimize confrontation. Unfortunately for them, the former melting pot of America is breaking down even between neighbors, and negotiations are swift when a full clip is doing the talking.

When mentioning the writing and later direction of storyteller Alex Garland, Dredd (the one with Karl Urban) was an underrated gem that deserved at least a trilogy. Ex Machina and Annihilation are existential nightmare fuel, and 28 Days Later is in a zombie league of its own. So what happened with A24’s Men? While the advertising suggests everything from a woman slowly going insane — akin to The Night House — to a supernatural stalker that would make Freddy Krueger look passé, the answer turned out to be neither… and far less interesting than everything viewers imagined. The first trailer of Civil War suggests urban warfare in major U.S. cities covered by embedded photojournalists recording the death of a nation, and questions flared into the imaginations of filmgoers over the dystopian possibilities. Rumors are already swirling this will be Garland’s final directed film, but what hath the filmmaker done? For those seeking an uninfluenced experience, stop reading here; for those already a bit suspicious, read on.

Make no mistake: there’s a stern warning here not to let political divides destroy what has been built in cooperation, all without even mentioning what those are. Garland isn’t taking questions about how his Civil War came about; he’s only interested in the disconnect between photojournalists and the horrors they see through a camera lens — or simply the way humanity can too-easily set aside empathy for selfish desires. Dunst channels the same energy portraying Lee as she did with her character Justine from Lars von Trier’s excellent Melancholia, both affected and energized by the events surrounding her. Likewise, Spaeny’s Jessie has to grow up fast, leaving little room for mistakes as a series of near misses allows her to fail upward. The dynamic between these two women is what the director demands viewers watch, but once the search for war details is abandoned to comply, the conclusion feels either very ham-fisted or overly contrived. Anyone who’s watched Men may recognize a familiar dissatisfaction, but this movie is thankfully still better than that.

Nothing in the entire film comes close the one-sheet poster of the occupied Statue of Liberty’s torch, but it still manages an atmosphere of dread as citizens pretend it isn’t the end of the world as they know it. In the film’s favor are some amazing street-level warfare sequences, especially when experienced in IMAX with the accompanying sound mix, neither of which will be available for the eventual home version (hint hint). Working against the film is the underutilization of both Offerman’s familiar-ish president and Jessie Plemons’ guest-star appearance as a rifle-happy survivalist. Television programs like “The Walking Dead” and “The Last of Us” have made apocalyptic travel commonplace, dropping viewers into safe and/or familiar locations turned into danger zones. Of course, this particular dystopia wasn’t caused by zombies or fungus, dispatching any sci-fi elements to showcase good ol’ evil humans taking advantage of a lawless situation… which pretty much how all these shows end up anyway.

Unlike the fictional U.S. invasion by foreign powers in Red Dawn, the ahead-of-its-time television show “Jericho” detailed the aftermath of a limited nuclear strike on American soil — later revealed to be domestic political extremists — that works as an acceptable prequel to Civil War’s endgame. In addition to the sentiment of “Doctor Who” pleading for leaders to talk out their issues first (read: what they’ll eventually have to do anyway) before sending out innocents to die, there’s the warning from The Boondock Saints about that other kind of evil: the apathy of good men… and women.

Civil War is rated R for strong violent content, bloody/disturbing images, language throughout, and “What kind of American are you?”

Three skull recommendation out of four