Alex Garland’s “Civil War” is brutal, unblinking and myopic, a sour taste of what a “real” civil war in the industrialized, armed-to-the-teeth United States might look like.

Garland, the thoughtful and thought-provoking auteur behind “Ex Machina,” “Annihilation” and “Men,” makes a smart and sobering political thriller that brushes past “how we got here” — because we’re seeing that literally every day in these Disunited States. He makes an attempt at playing this civil war tale as “apolitical,” but clues are there if you watch and listen.

He lightly touches on the Big Picture and instead shows us the brutality of war the way most of those caught in the middle of a conflict experience it — personal, limited to what we can see on the horizon and what we’re facing close at hand. The firefights are either just down the road, or just across the parking lot.

Nobody wants to be on the receiving end of a visit from a tank, an armored Humvee or a helicopter gunship. “Bad guys” and “good guys” fall, battle lines are blurred along with everything else shrouded in “the fog of war.” All noncombatants are, when the smoke clears, is “collateral damage.

It’s sometimes riveting, almost wrenching at others and kind of depressing. And it generally succeeds in its main mission, de-romanticizing “civil war” and “secession,” words that the glib, the rural, old-enough-to-know-better low-information voter types and their leaders throw around.

Kirsten Dunst grimly plays a veteran conflict photographer wearing the “thousand yard stare” of someone who’s seen it all, and a tad too often to let it impact her.

“Every time I survived a war zone — and got the photo — I thought I was sending a warning home. ‘Don’t DO this.’ But here we are.”

Photographer Lee works with reporter Joel (Wagner Maura of “The Gray Man” and TV’s “Narcos”), and they’re about to embark on a trip to Washington, D.C., crossing through lines where “We work for Reuters” is just another way they could get killed. It “don’t sound American.”

But that’s where they’re headed, hoping for a chance to interview and photograph the “third term” president (Nick Offerman, playing it straight) whom we’ve seen rehearsing his spin on a “great victory” announcement and the hyperbole that accompanied it.

All his talk about offering the “secession states” of the “Florida Alliance” and “Western Forces” (Texas and California) a chance to cease hostilities, we gather, was propaganda. Joel and Lee want to get to D.C. before the rebel forces close in on the United States Army and Secret Service et al defending that city and this sitting president.

We’ve seen the way these reporters and photographers hurl themselves into danger, walking into a New York riot as it begins, getting entirely too close to firefights when they break out. Lee must have some notion of the bullets that don’t have her name on them. Yellow vests and “press” helmets and passes aren’t bullet proof.

A kid (Cailee Spaeney) who calls herself 23 and could pass for 15, who shoots on celluloid film because her dad did, fangirls over Lee. But Joel is the one she talks into letting her ride along to Washington, by way of Western Pennsylvania and Charlottesville (“the front lines”). As Lee has allowed aged, hobbled New York Times reporter Stephen (the regal Stephen McKinley Henderson) to ride in their “Press” marked Ford Excursion, fair is fair.

Lee’s motherly-without-being-a-mother objections set up the back-and-forth with Jessie the kid about how hard-nosed you have to be to do this job.  Heartless enough to photograph “me if I get shot,” Jessie wants to know?

In a dozen other movies, a line like that counts as foreshadowing.

On their trek they will stumble into a sniper situation, a mass grave and the scary soldiers (Jesse Plemons, aka Mr. Kirsten Dunst plays the scariest) filling it. They will banter with other press, grit their teeth over those “embedded” with one side or the other and face combat between regular and irregular forces, grimly documented by black and white still shots by our photographers.

Torture and summary executions long ago returned to warfare of the “civil war” variety. Hating “the other,” obsessing about guns, violence and the death penalty will do that to a people.

Little details enrich their odyssey. “Canadian” money is more valuable when you’re trying to score gas from assault-rifle-armed convenience store commandos. Rural folks, near and far, have found an excuse to “keep away” from all that and carry on some semblence of normal life.

Is Garland making an ironic comment on the “rural white rage” that is driving much of this Trumpist rhetoric? Big talkers want to start a civil war, and then sit it out?

The film’s refusal to play politics with all this allows Garland to play up the futility, destruction and horrors of war, which haven’t reached American soil for 150 years and counting. Ask Greece, Chile, Spain, inhabitants of the former Yugoslavia or Syrians about the “real” thing Americans too old to do the fighting or too dumb to grasp what they’re suggesting keep calling for.

Avoiding politics and The Big Picture of strategy strips away any suggestion of foreign alliances backing this or that side — Russians, for instance. But letting us see a president changing the Constitution to allow a third term, lying like he breathes and linked to the word “Greenland” tips the movie’s hand as to who Offerman is playing.

A Texas/California “Western Alliance” isn’t as far-fetched, politically, as it might seem with the current regime running Texas. Demographics are a time-bomb the rabble-rousing right won’t be able to defuse before a near-future “fair” election lets them know for whom the bell tolls.

But I was troubled by the many scenes of journalists who act like they’re immune to the mayhem and lead flying all around them, as if Gaza hadn’t taught them a lesson in this alt-history/dystopian near future. The whole reason for telephoto lenses is that you don’t have to get into the line of fire.

And for all this recklessness and risk-taking to “get the shot” and “report” as witnesses what they see, there’s damned little journalism or “reporting” going on here. Nobody takes a note or yanks out a notebook. Jessie? She doesn’t even work for anybody.

Garland may have consulted conflict zone photographers and reporters while scripting this. But one senses he got most of this version of such people from the movies — “Under Fire,” “Salvador,” “Welcome to Sarejveo.”

“Civil War” is still an immersive, grimly realistic combat picture with tantalizing “what ifs” built into it, a Georgia-shot version of what happens if we really let the radicalized, riled-up and don’t-think-things-through third of the country get their wish.

It’s all fun and games in the movies. But when a real F-35 or drone or Humvee is barreling down on you, that’s a little late to figure out “Why can’t we all just get along?”

Rating:R for strong violent content, bloody/disturbing images, and profanity

Cast: Kirsten Dunst, Nick Offerman, Jesse Plemons, Nelson Lee,
Cailee Spaeny and Stephen McKinley Henderson.

Credits: Scripted and directed by Alex Garland. An A24 release.

Running time: 1:49