@mejs other thing the movie gets right is the normalisation of atrocities and violence. The life continues, just there is a war going on and people are dying. I had a friend from Sarajevo once tell me how great the parties were during the war. It just makes no sense, and any movie trying to pick it apart rationally would be doomed to failure.
@mejs de gustibus I guess, as my favourite film critic (Mark Kermode) says: you get what you bring to the movie. Guess we brought different things to the movie.
But even if you don't like it, if it made people think and talk about civil wars in general, and in the US in particular it was worth creating.
@ProfT this is what I was hoping the movie would explore more! But you get one cryptic scene with the clothes store resembling that normalcy, and the characters themselves are dumbfounded by it for some reason and then they just move. 99% of the places they visit are like a zombie apocalypse with no people at all. I think your interpretations here are valuable and spot on, but I didn't see those things in the actual movie, just sequences of scenes pasted together