Why Is 'Civil War' So Evasive?

I’ve never heard gunshots like the ones in Civil War. Or, rather, I’ve never heard them in a movie. If you’ve ever been to a firing range, or just lived in a city for a while, you know the sound, a dry, brittle snap so unlike the seat-rattling boom when John Wick puts down a rival. You hear it a lot in Alex Garland’s movie, as the Reuters photojournalist Lee, played by Kirsten Dunst, makes her way through the combat zone that is now the eastern United States, along with her colleague Joel (Wagner Moura), the novice photographer Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), a writer for “what’s left of the New York Times.” Movie gunfire usually hits you in the chest, emphasizing the power of the person doing the shooting. But Civil War’s trebly pops lodge in your shoulders, building up tension with no hope of release. “Cinema has this funny way of being reassuring, in subtle ways, whilst being very dramatic,” Garland told the Globe and Mail this week. “We took some of the reassuring subtleties out.”