Review of Warfare (d. Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland, 2025)
In his 1990 short story “How to Tell a True War Story,” Vietnam War veteran Tim O’Brien warns that “happeningness”–that is, whether or not an event, be it an act of selfless heroism or one of seemingly unconscionable depravity, actually occurred–“is irrelevant” when attempting to capture battlefield realities. “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth,” he writes, a line that doubles as a canny bit of criticism. Perhaps the only place war is more common than in the real world is in fiction, where it serves as the basis for a constantly rejuvenating stream of literature, films, and of course, video games. How many of these tout a hitherto unforeseen realism–a renewed commitment to depicting the viscera-stained bravery that secures the very peacetime that makes us lose sight of its necessity–as their raison d’être? Warfare, the new film co-directed and co-written by former Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza and the English filmmaker Alex Garland, is the latest such offering. The film’s no-frills, all-thrills logline tells us that “everything is based on memory,” in this case Mendoza’s memory of his U.S. Navy SEAL platoon’s narrow escape from the Battle of Ramadi on November 19, 2006. Yet O’Brien’s seemingly contradictory insight proves penetrating with a work as calculated as Warfare: the happeningness of its brutalities is no guarantor of their truth.
The stabs at realism in Warfare are imposing: here’s a 95-minute film told mostly in real time, aside from a pair of opening scenes taking place the previous day. The first introduces us to the Alpha One platoon of Navy SEALs we’ll soon follow through hell and back, and the only moment in which we’ll find them at ease. Dressed in camo-clad tactical gear and armed to the teeth, the men hoot and holler while huddled around a laptop screen. They’re watching the music video for the Swedish DJ Eric Prydz’s 2004 hit “Call On Me,” which centers on a woman’s aerobics class as imagined by the male id, all skin-tight leotards and thrusting hips. Are Garland and Mendoza critiquing the sort of boys-will-be-boys brand of masculinity that fuels the military industrial complex, collapsing distinctions between conquests of sex and those of empire? This most poker-faced of films would never give such an early tell; this is just what happened, nothing more. We then abruptly cut to the next happening, one which establishes the story proper: under the cover of night, Alpha One find shelter from the ongoing battle by commandeering a suburban Ramadi household. Via translators, they command the family living inside to sequester to a single room and remain quiet if they wish to live.
The next half-hour finds the platoon developing a plan to get back to safety (admittedly a relative term in this case). It’s here where Mendoza’s memories prove most insightful, as they eschew the high drama of bloody conflict for the tedium of the workplace. We see the various delegated roles upon which the platoon’s safety depends, with most of their labor dedicated to either navigating the bureaucracy of military communication (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai plays the fictional version of Mendoza, a Joint Terminal Attack Controller who spends much of the film radioing in vain for air support) or monitoring the surrounding streets for potential sources of escalation (Taylor John Smith and Cosmo Jarvis play snipers scanning for adversaries through their rifle’s scopes; they trade shifts as their bodies grow stiff form the prolonged stillness). Ratcheting up tension without the accompaniment of musical score and instead from the mounting accumulation of complications that jeopardize the platoon’s exit strategy—as a group of Iraqi men gather in a nearby house, one soldier muses that it “looks like they’re getting their Jihad on”—this is process cinema, dedicated less to oorah exceptionalism and more to the dense web of logistics that must be painstakingly worked through in even the smallest military operations.
This idle can’t last, of course, and the film’s final hour swerves back toward cacophonous convention as Alpha One’s position is discovered and summarily compromised. As in Garland’s previous feature, last year’s similarly battle-centric Civil War, Garland proves himself a technically adept orchestrator of concussive combat. Those tense silences give way to the blaring of gunfire, explosives, and the agonized wails of Joseph Quinn’s Leading Petty Officer, who suffers some of the most gruesome lower body injuries ever put to screen. After many setbacks and heavy losses, deliverance comes in the form of Charles Melton’s Assistant Officer in Charge, who secures a Bradley tank that leads the men back to safety after Will Poulter’s Officer in Charge failed to do so under the surrounding duress. The film concludes with a montage depicting the real men who survived the ordeal, and a title card that thanks them “for always answering the call.”
It’s the belief of the filmmakers–as well as Warfare’s producing studio A24–that such invocations of real battlefield experience will help us better honor the bravery of these men. I wonder who actually questions that; I also wonder who is served by a film that depicts American involvement in the Iraq war—or any war, really—with such tunnel vision, never lending a voice to any Iraqi civilians or questioning the indisputably political decisions that led to those men being trapped in that house in the first place. Just as in Civil War, which attempted to render an imagined American conflict as an everybody’s-awful antipolitical spectacle, the film’s hyperreal violence inures rather than shocks due to how carefully it’s been pruned of its context. Perhaps that’s failing to agree to both his and Mendoza’s expressed rules of engagement. But I’m inclined to believe that the film is less the latest realist breakthrough of war fiction than yet another “show of force”: like those low-level flyovers that merely stun enemy combatants with sound and fury without inflicting any lasting damage, Warfare’s truths vanish once the dust settles.
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Reviewed 4/18/2025