The divisions in America are so severe, we’re told, that we’re heading for civil war. It’s a sentiment one hears frequently. Never have we as a nation been so polarized. Democrat and Republican. Left and right. Blue and red. Liberal and conservative. Civil war, if not inevitable, is at least in the air.

Well, Hollywood has put that notion on the big screen. And post-apocalypticists the country round rushed to the cineplexes in such numbers as to make Alex Garland’s Civil War last weekend’s top movie.

This is not fun post-apocalypticism, though – less John Carpenter’s Escape from New York and more Cormac McCarthy’s The Road; less Zombieland and more 28 Days Later. 

The buzz about the movie from the get-go has been its ambiguity. Much-ballyhooed was Garland’s effort to play both sides. Think of it as a cinematic gloss on Michael Jordan’s “Republicans buy sneakers too,” and in an election year, to boot.

Garland played both sides, all right. But the result is an incomprehensible hodgepodge to anybody who follows the news.

We join the action in an empty-streets Brooklyn, where a suicide bomber disrupts a gathering of citizens fighting over water rations. The country is embroiled in civil war, we’re told. We know nothing about why there is a civil war at the beginning of the movie, and we don’t know any more at the end. There just is.

Nineteen states have seceded, and the major rebel group is called the Western Forces, comprising Texas and, um, California. There’s a Florida Alliance in there, too. The president is still among the living, but not for long, as the rebel forces are descending on Washington and will certainly eliminate him. He’s been a bad dude; he has killed reporters, bombed American citizens, disbanded the FBI, and, now serving his third term, perforce suspended some, and who knows how much else, of the Constitution. Oh, yes, he wears a suit with a red tie, is given to exaggeration, and is compared by one character to Gaddafi and Mussolini.

The country is in chaos. The dollar has tanked, and only the Canadian dollar has any value. The New York Times still exists but just barely. The scenes of war dominate the landscape: military checkpoints, bodies hanging from highway overpasses, interstate highways clogged with disabled vehicles, a football stadium turned into a refugee camp.

Some critics can’t help but tap into their inner TDS, as they see Jan. 6 everywhere they look. Writes Mary McNamara at the Los Angeles Times:

But in the wake of Jan. 6, and with Trump’s violent rhetoric once again on full display as he campaigns to return to the White House, it’s impossible not to see “Civil War” as a cinematic vision of what could happen should Trump succeed.

But who’s who does not match up. If a Trump-like conservative is in the White House, how can the rebels be so well organized and well-armed? They have helicopters, fighter planes, and armored vehicles; their soldiers are decked out in all the requisite military gear. They look like a proper fighting force. Could Antifa or leftists or enviro-fascists pull off something like this, or did we have an army coup somewhere along the line? We’re left to ponder.

In the most memorable scene in the movie, a commando-type played by Jesse Plemons has the movie’s four main characters and two buddies at his mercy, waving a gun in their faces and asking “what kind of American they are.” He finds two of them insufficiently American and shoots them at point-blank range. He represents everything liberals think conservatives are, but it’s unclear what side he’s on, that of the Western Forces or of the government.

Four journalists are the central characters in this drama. And were the movie titled War Photographers and not Civil War, we’d get a better feel for the movie’s essence.

Two of the four are photogs — Lee, played by Kirsten Dunst, who is an old hand and has been through so many wars as to have PTSD, and a young hanger-on named Jessie (Cailee Spaeny), who idolizes Lee and wants to learn war photography from her hero. The other two are print reporters — Lee’s writing partner from Reuters, Joel (Wagner Moura); and Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henderson), from the New York Times (or “what’s left of the New York Times,” to use the words with which he’s introduced).

Lee and Joel want to get to Washington to interview the president before he is captured and killed. But they’re in New York, and as Interstate 95 is apparently closed and they are warned to steer clear of Philadelphia, they have to jog way out through West Virginia to get there.

And thus the movie turns into a road trip saga as well. But even though they’re traveling through a land decimated by the depredations of war — where they watch cold-blooded executions and have to barter for gasoline with commandoes toting machine guns, ducking for cover to avoid sniper fire — these journalists offer no help to the discombobulated viewer trying to connect the unconnectable dots of a backstory. The journalists don’t seem to care why what’s going on is going on, or else they’re so beyond it emotionally that they’re burnt out.

All they’re interested in is documenting it. The movie is sort of a paean to old-school objective journalism. These journalists have no opinions; they’re only after the story, the scoop. The photographers’ goal is the money shot, the photo. Says Lee at one point: “We record so other people ask. That’s the job.” So that part of it doesn’t make sense either. When did we last see journalists keeping their thumb off the political scale in America?

It’s fantasy to imagine a civil war bursting out in America. It’s hard to fathom a faction of rebels growing to sufficient power to threaten the U.S. military, with its planes and tanks and well-armed battalions. The government, any government from whichever political persuasion, would come down on that rebel contingent with overwhelming destructive force. There would be a quashed rebellion but no civil war.

But divided we are at the moment. So divided that it’s hard to imagine a this-worldly force of such puissance as to unite this nation against it. We have pro-Hamas demonstrations shutting down roads across the country and “Death to America” chanted in rallies not only in the Middle East but also in the Middle West.

Unless we wake up one morning to see 15 Rhode Island–sized spaceships hovering over our cities and threatening to incinerate them via death ray, it’s difficult to conceive of any unifying force rallying the country to stand in opposition.

And we’ve already seen that movie.