Civil War
A near-future America is - for reasons left very vague - undergoing a civil war, pitting an alliance of Texas and California, plus a rebellious Florida, against what's left of the federal government. The film follows a group of reporters as they travel from New York to Washington, in an attempt to interview the president before the expected fall of the government. The first two thirds of the story is a brutal road trip through a fragmented, militia-run landscape, the final third is a war movie of high intensity urban combat. It's really well done, very tense in places, looks great and some good performances.
But... as a film about journalists, it's really off. The reporters are just all wrong - too reckless and crazy. I've worked with plenty of reporters covering conflict and most of them are pretty sober and quite geeky. The print reporter in Civil War doesn't do one interview the entire time, what are Reuters paying this guy for?! Alex Garland clearly spent too much time watching Apocalypse Now and playing first person shooters, but it's still a decent movie despite my gripes.
I rather took that second paragraph as the point. They were broken, lost, who were they reporting to anyway, anymore. A lifetime reporting on brutal conflicts abroad to their home audience, only to watch that audience descend into that same chaos. That psychotic militia man casually killing anything “other”, no longer the product of some imagined third world/racial depravity or poverty that happens “somewhere else”. So, they went looking for answers for their own fragile sanity. I don’t think we were meant to think they found those answers.