Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare is an admirable attempt to counter the truism that there’s no such thing as an anti-war movie — that all war movies, however gruesome or wrenching, effectively (and often unwittingly) wind up glamorizing combat to some degree. The idea is a bit more nuanced than that, of course: There have been plenty of brutal and decidedly unglamorous war films, but the act of storytelling itself creates an immediate (and sometimes even subconscious) connection with the soldiers onscreen. To undo the allure of movie combat, one must undo the notion of character, maybe even of storytelling itself.
And so, Warfare presents a 95-minute journey through the hell of one bloody engagement during the Iraq War, when a group of Navy SEALs found themselves pinned down in a two -story house in Ramadi. Despite the presence of several well-known actors — including Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Charles Melton, and Kit Connor — character development and identification are minimal. (During the end credits, when the film presents pictures of the actors and their real-life counterparts, I still couldn’t tell most of them apart.) The most relatable thing anyone does in the film is to become paralyzed with fear, which happens to at least one guy. Another seems to half-pass out, either from exhaustion or shock, while tending to a wounded comrade. The dialogue mostly consists of jargony instructions and requests desperately relayed over radios, or the blood-curdling screams of mortally wounded soldiers. Their injuries are stomach-turning, their cries agonizing. There are severed limbs strewn everywhere. The distributor, A24, assures us we must experience it all in IMAX.
Mendoza is himself a former Navy SEAL and lived through the events depicted in the picture. (He’s played in the movie by Reservation Dogs’ D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai.) Garland is a director who likes ground-level depictions of extreme, even surreal situations. As a result, the filmmakers do achieve what feels like genuine authenticity in their depictions of combat, both when it comes to direct engagements and the long, uncertain periods of standing around and waiting between such engagements. The lack of context around what these men are doing in this part of town and why feels purposeful, and it’s reflected symbolically in sequences where the screen fills with fumes and dust from smoke grenades and other explosions while the sound either drops out completely or is muffled down to a hazy thrum of distant gunshots and heavy breathing. In Warfare, the fog of war is both a literal and spiritual fact.
Garland and Mendoza do sneak in moments of greater meaning, however, particularly in their spare depiction of the families in whose houses these soldiers have holed up. We see these people very briefly, and there is one particularly intense stretch when we might even become convinced that the movie has forgotten about them entirely. But there’s an authenticity to this, too: These people are an afterthought to these soldiers, and in its own way their presence becomes symbolic of all Iraqis caught in the middle of a conflict most of them had nothing to do with but were pulled into anyway. Meanwhile, the insurgents attacking the American soldiers are truly faceless. Aside from some initial views through a rifle scope, we almost never see them — save for one startling, pointed moment late in the film which I will not give away. (That said, the idea of worrying about spoilers in a movie about the horrors of combat does feel somewhat obscene.) Suffice it to say that the filmmakers have kept the other side of the fight mostly hidden for a reason.
Garland made waves last year with the divisive Civil War, which depicted a group of war correspondents and photographers making their way through the Eastern seaboard of a divided and wrecked United States. That film came under fire from some for not offering a clearly identifiable political perspective on its fictional conflict. But its politics were experiential, not ideological: In depicting the U.S. as the kind of distant, war-torn wasteland so familiar to us from news reports from other countries, the film flipped the camera on our commodification of conflict. Though Warfare depicts an instance from recent history, it would make a fine companion piece to its cinematic predecessor. In both cases, Garland wants to plunge us into the immediate reality of a situation — one speculative, one from the recent past — and open our eyes to the horrors of what others have experienced.
