Alex Garland’s previous film, Civil War, culminated in a pulse-pounding ground assault on the White House that instantly became one of the best combat sequences put to film. That film benefitted from the expertise of its military advisor Ray Mendoza, a retired Navy SEAL and veteran of the Iraq War.
Now, Garland and Mendoza are collaborating again, this time as co-directors and co-writers on Warfare, a film based on real events that happened to Mendoza and his SEAL team in Ramadi, Iraq in 2006. Warfare is that White House assault sequence stretched out to feature film length, 95 minutes of nerve-shattering stress and panic and pain that makes a bid for being the most realistic war film ever made.
Warfare is tightly focused on a single day in the lives of SEAL Team Alpha One, which includes Ray Mendoza (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) as its communications officer. The team is sent to take control of a specific building, which turns out to be a multi-family home. The Iraqi families are told to remain quiet and in place, and that’s all we ever know about them. To be fair, we don’t get to know much about Ray and his fellow soldiers, either; Warfare isn’t interested in their lives outside of this one moment. We do, however, get to see the camaraderie and teamwork that define them, we can feel the brotherhood that bonds them. Do we know about their lives back home or their hopes for the future? Not really. But by virtue of being framed as the protagonists and positioned as the ones under attack, despite being the ones who burst into this building armed to the gills, we root for their survival.
If the willfully obtuse politics of Civil War frustrated you, Warfare will, too. Garland and Mendoza are entirely uninterested in taking any kind of stance on the Iraq War. The most generous read is that Mendoza is motivated by a desire to honor his teammates by preserving the memory of what they went through, and that by showing the graphic destruction of these young men—physical and psychic—Garland is making an anti-war statement about the futility and waste of throwing away bright young lives for someone else’s gain. Certainly, the young men on the ground won nothing that day, but somebody somewhere must have gotten something out of the Iraq War.
Movies don’t always have to have a point, not every film has to be didactic, but it’s harder to justify floating on vibes when the subject is literally history. Freaky Tales can do it because it’s a fanciful ode to a past that never happened. But the Iraq War did happen, this attack in 2006 in Ramadi happened. And knowing everything we know now, it is impossible NOT to think about that while watching Warfare, which makes the film’s disinterest in the meaning and politics of it all frustrating at best, hollow at worst.
Of course, if you just want your movies to shut up and entertain, that read is available to you, too. You can just watch and absorb Warfare as a tribute to the soldiers who fought and died for…whatever. Project your own meaning into it. Warfare is an empty thematic jug for anyone to fill with whatever they want.
But as a piece of filmmaking, it is impossible to deny the technical achievement of Warfare. Absent a score, the sound design soars to the forefront, a cacophony of screams, gunfire, bombs, jet engines, and clipped dialogue. This is truly spectacular sound design. Similarly, David J. Thompson’s cinematography puts us in the middle of the chaos and confusion, aided by Fin Oates’ stellar editing. And the cast, made up almost entirely of the hottest emerging actors under 35, effectively sells not only the camaraderie of a SEAL team but also the discipline and expertise of American soldiers. Survival is a team effort, and this team is ready for the Super Bowl.
The lack of any meaning might haunt Warfare’s legacy, but in the moment, it is a visceral experience of war that is unforgettable. Of course, you can never really know what it was like to serve in the Iraq War unless you were actually there, but for those of us who weren’t—which is most of us—Warfare offers something like the experience. It recalls other great cinematic battle sequences like the D-Day invasion in Saving Private Ryan for its ability to offer a clear window into an experience we’ll never personally have, allowing us to empathize with what the soldiers (but not the Iraqis) went through on that day. If you ever needed verification that war is hell, Warfare is that thesis statement, it is hell on film. It’s not much else but it is at least that, a visual document that war is, in fact, hell.
Attached – Ray Mendoza, Alex Garland, Kit Connor, and Michael Gandolfini at a screening for the film earlier this week.
Warfare is now playing exclusively in theaters.
