Despite its sheen of boldness, Alex Garland’s film cowers in fear from the divisions that surely inspired the movie in the first place, missing an opportunity to say something important.

Tense, disturbing, riveting, Alex Garland’s dystopian film Civil War examines an existential threat preying on the American sub-conscious: What would happen if the political and social divisions cleaving the United States ultimately collapse the nation into the abyss? What if the wars of rhetoric, of culture, of values, cause a series of irreparable breaks, whole states secede and we descend into an actual war?

Great storytelling requires an answer to the question left hanging in the center of Garland’s otherwise solid film: How in the world did it come to this? It is a question that vexes both the film and the viewer. Civil War tells us bad things are happening, but never tells us why they are happening.

There is so much blood in this soil, and the film imagines even more, a slow drip from mangled bodies — but for what cause? 

In Civil War, as journalists Lee Smith (Kirsten Dunst), Joel (Wagner Moura), Sammy (Stephen McKinley Henerson) and Jessie (Cailee Spaeny) travel through the war-torn Mid-Atlantic, taking a route through West Virginia to get from New York to Washington, D.C., they maintain their journalistic integrity and an innate compulsion to document the truths driving them into the deadliest zone of military combat. By visually documenting the tragedy of a not-so-distant future with impartiality, these journalists demonstrate heart and guts and even glory, but few opinions. Aside from one expression of passionate frustration with an American president who has disrupted norms and engaged in acts of authoritarianism, there is no commentary. The only scene that finds them intervening, attempting to make an impact on rising tensions, and changing a likely outcome, is one in which they are trying to save the lives of their colleagues, and not a single photograph is taken.

This is also the scene in which Jesse Plemons delivers the line that guts the emotional center of the film: “What kind of American are you?”

In one scene, in a strip of a small town, where water is so abundant that lawns are watered with sprinklers hooked to hose lines, a salesgirl pouts when out-of-towners distract her from a great book, and an old woman, her shirt starched, walks a small dog without fear. There are rooftop snipers everywhere. This is a place where the people came together to keep the chaos out. In the filmmaker’s vision, American life exists only because of armed patrols.

So, what is America?

No one in the film knows the answer to that simple question delivered by Plemons, but everyone watching it knows why those Black and Brown bodies are in a deep, open grave tended by the unnamed soldier he plays.