Civil War is like that throughout—a surface-level understanding of "conflict" or "controversy" without any interest in interrogating the reasons for it any more deeply. Garland, whose Annihilation adaptation featured arresting imagery that told its story without telling you its story, has written himself into a corner on this one. He wants war imagery, the ultimate conflict and thus the ultimate opportunity for his intrepid main characters to be the ultimate journalists. (The main players are Dunst, Cailee Spaeny, Wagner Moura, and poor Stephen McKinley Henderson, who bites it in the penultimate setpiece, along with most of the other characters of color in the film. I'm not going any further into their characters because our Jacob Oller already covered them in his review and they're all of them infuriatingly one-note.)

But, because his script refuses to explain why America is at war, Garland manages to say nothing about the nature of the conflict and nothing about journalism, in either imagery or dialogue, which contains some thudding duds. The central conceits that we do receive—California and Texas are some faction called "The Western Forces," and apparently there are other factions (Who? Where? Why? Where are the main characters from, and to whom do they ostensibly owe allegiance? How in the hell would cogent regional factions even form in the continental United States, which has relatively reliable and well-developed highways and whose central federal authority is drowning in tanks, drones, spy planes and various other weapons that render the Second Amendment a joke?)

Civil War's episodic structure sees the war photographer protagonists traveling from New York City to Washington, D.C. in what they know are the final days of this conflict. They believe, against all reason, that they can get an interview with the President (Nick Offerman), seen in the opening scene stumbling over his address to the nation. Everybody knows he is putting on a brave face. The characters practice questions they'll ask him that are supposedly Eerily Revealing of the Situation: He's performed drone strikes on Americans, he's in his third term, etc. They instead reveal nothing. If Garland is pointing out that Obama and Trump both blew up a lot of people while in office, he's also not bothering to tell us who is being blown up or why.

Other episodes feature the photogs hitting the deck alongside a pair of snipers who are pinned down by another sniper. When directly asked who they work for, they refuse to say. Another—this is the part where poor Henderson dies valiantly so the white folk can feel sad—features Jesse Plemons as the leader of a pack of racist shooters who are dumping bodies into a pit. He executes the Asian characters for not being from America, but there's no statement on what faction he's with or if he even is with one. It's random racialized violence that refuses to take a stand on who is doing the racialized violence. There is a scene where the photogs are embedded with some guys—we don't know who, we don't know why—as they try to take a high enemy position. This fire team the photogs are with are all wearing Hawaiian shirts under their Kevlar. Are they local militia? Is this the standard uniform of the California contingent? Did all their houses burn down while only their vacation clothes in the trunk of the car survive, or do they value their lives so little that they go into a firefight in clothing you can spot a mile off?

Civil War is so dedicated to refusing to take a side that it even shows in its credits: There is footage in this movie from Andy Ngo, a right-wing parody of a journalist who has come to prominence in an age defined by a concerted effort to destroy journalism. The credits also thank Helen Lewis, who has written on feminism, said she's pro-trans unless you want to share locker rooms or rape shelters, and to my knowledge has zero war photography experience. (So on balance, Garland has catered to political net neutrality and avowedly pro-trans sympathies except in one of the major areas where they need support and acceptance: Truly the ideal average American ideological outlook!)

Civil War isn't a bad movie in its technique. The performances aren't bad performances. There are interesting ideas when the movie tries to frame these conflicts from the perspective of the war photographers—stopping on black-and-white freeze-frames in the midst of battle, the roaring of machine guns and grenades interrupted by the click of a camera's shutter. It's just that Garland is not at all interested in the central conceit of his premise when everybody in the audience reasonably cannot help but be interested in it. Right here today, we have governors defying the federal government so that they can torture refugees at the border, unhinged patriarchs getting into standoffs with the Bureau of Land Management, and an ex-president who tried to pressure the country's military brass to gun down protesters. We're already almost here, and Garland is over here suggesting that there is some scenario—in the same universe where the strong nuclear forces hold together the atoms of which we are all composed—in which California and Texas would agree enough on fucking anything to join into a military coalition.

You should speak truth when you have the chance. So here it is: Conservative forces in the United States are exhibiting fascist tendencies, pushing for a world that the normal, politically oblivious average American would never want to live in. I know this because this is the world they are currently bringing about, from their positions of entrenched minoritarian power. If the big boogaloo happens, it will be because they force the issue, not because of Black Lives Matter protesters or poor trans kids. To claim the sort of symmetry between these positions that would cause a land war across the Lower 48 is ludicrous.

The last scene of the movie (spoiler alert) is a raid on the White House. It is the definitive proof of Truffaut's comment that there really isn't such a thing as an anti-war movie, because war looks so compelling onscreen. Garland lays on the fireworks, and in the end we see the moment where the photogs and the Western Forces hook the big fish. The President gets executed right in front of one of the photogs—I'll bet she wished she went with a DSLR with rapid-fire rather than a film camera she has to manually advance. We are supposed to feel some grim catharsis, after the deaths of main characters and the harrowing journey here.

Moura's character looms over the president in the moment before he is killed and asks him for a quote like he's giving out the one-liner before pulling the trigger himself. I know it's because half his crew got mulched on the way over, but what did they die for? I don't know the nature of the guy's tyranny. What is being toppled? What will rise in its place?

Those are the actual questions journalism asks, or should be asking. Civil War doesn't care.