Before Alex Garland’s explosive apocalypse movie Civil War could even hit theaters, it was already one of the most divisive films of the year. Its depiction of a near-future United States torn apart by a civil war garnered criticisms over its apparent ignorance — or maybe blatant avoidance — of the country’s real-world political landscape. But the biggest, and most baffling, criticism against Civil War is that it is “apolitical.” That’s the criticism that Garland bristles against the most.

“People keep saying the film is not political. I think they're just missing the point,” Garland tells Inverse. “It's just not stating politics in the way they want it to be stated.”

Garland may leave it up to his audience to parse out Civil War’s meaning for themselves. But in conversation with the director, along with cast members Wagner Moura and Nick Offerman, it’s clear that everyone involved has plenty to say about politics, journalism, modern culture, and how the movie wraps them all together into a not-so-tidy package.

The universe is hiding something.

Stars at the outer edges of galaxies whirl around the galactic center far more swiftly than the laws of physics say they should. At even larger scales, galaxy clusters clump together in ways that should only be possible if the galaxies were more massive than they appear. And most of our models of how the Big Bang happened suggest that much more matter should have been created than we see.

Either there’s more to the universe than meets the eye, or the rules of physics work very differently than we think they do. Most astrophysicists and cosmologists (scientists who study the origins and evolution of the universe) today lean toward the first option: dark matter. But a few have devoted their efforts to finding a set of rules that could produce the universe we see, without dark matter.

Inverse spoke with experts in both fields about dark matter, the laws that make our universe work, and the quest to understand everything.