Warfare Is A Thunderous, Nail-Biting Military Thriller At War With Itself
Co-directed by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, the A24 release is terrifying and tense.
Few American war movies have featured the kind of breathtaking tension Warfare instills — or the kind of eardrum-rupturing sound. Coming off the speculative war photographer drama Civil War, Alex Garland (who co-directs Warfare with former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza) crafts an explosively gripping Iraq War thriller, whose mere 95 minutes play out like an extended nightmare of blood and bone. Its screenplay is drawn from traumatic memories as retold by U.S. soldiers on the ground, making it both fragile, and susceptible to highly subjective whims. The result is a harrowing work of cinema whose intuitive (and at times ugly) story is locked in an inherent clash with its own top-down imagery.
The broad strokes of Warfare resemble your run-of-the-mill “war on terror” production, à la Peter Beg’s Afghanistan-set Mark Wahlberg vehicle Lone Survivor. Both films are based on true stories, and follow Navy SEALs surveilling, and then engaging, in firefights with armed insurgents. But where Berg’s movie has an almost holy reverence for American death in the line of duty, Garland and Mendoza’s features no such glory around suffering. Its matter-of-fact irreligiousness verges on nihilistic, making its protracted scenes (and screams) of anguish so excessive that they eventually tip over into slapstick hilarity. Mind you: that’s a good thing. It’s the kind of movie where you have no choice but to laugh — if only to relieve some of the maddening tension — at the soldiers’ horrifying predicament.
D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai plays a young Ray Mendoza in the co-director retread of his Iraq War memories.
Warfare follows communications officer Mendoza (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) and his well-oiled unit as they invade a two-story residential building under cover of darkness, and all but hold an Iraqi family hostage in order to set up their bird's nest. For the next several hours, medic/marksman Elliot Miller (Cosmo Jarvis) keeps watch on a structure across the street through his sniper scope, via a hole they hammer out in the family’s wall.
This is the core premise of Warfare, and it eventually leads to Mendoza’s unit being besieged from all sides by armed attackers, forcing them to embark on a risky rescue mission for two of their gravely injured comrades.
With a who’s who of young American and British actors playing the movie’s uniformed gunmen — such as Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Woon-A-Tai, and Michael Gandolfini, with minor roles played by heartthrobs Charles Melton and Noah Centineo — Warfare runs the risk of making its soldiers far too endearing, for a film that very much frames them as violent invaders. While the movie’s love for its American characters penetrates the thick dust and debris that engulfs them, its opening scene sets the stage for a story where their youthfulness isn’t so much innocence corrupted as it is juvenile naivete with a hedonistic penchant. The film’s first images see them gathered around a laptop to watch and dance to a pulsating ‘80s workout video, in lieu of pornography.
On the other hand, to satirize these characters as mere thoughtless lunks would be a disservice to Mendoza’s own POV (and that of his compatriots, whose recollections contributed to the script). Its adoration for them ensures that Warfare ends up in a fascinating middle ground. It’s part tribute, part remorseful retrospective as told from an older, wiser vantage. That it ends up fully committing to neither outlook is part of its strange and fascinating complexity.
The raucous opening scene of the unite enjoying an aerobics video is immediately cut by the hair-raising tension of the rest of the film.
The approach the filmmakers take often calls into question the very nature of the violence to which we bear witness. For the first half-hour or so — about a third of the movie’s runtime — not a single gun or explosive goes off, but the result is no less anxiety-inducing. Using Miller’s sniper scope and a drone in the sky, Warfare creates hair-raising tension around its characters — even as they lie in wait — by establishing their overall geography in contrast to their blindspots and limited vantage points. In the process, the mere anticipation of violence becomes thoroughly nerve-wracking.
During this buildup, no “violence” unfolds in the traditional sense, according to the language of American war films. However, the movie feels violent nonetheless, owing to the brutishness with which the troops knock down residential walls with sledgehammers, and keep a civilian family sequestered to their bedroom, children included. The soldiers’ very presence is violent, and whatever the larger politics of the invasion, the film’s lack of immediate context frames any violence inflicted upon the unit as distinctly retaliatory. The story may as well be a concentrated metaphor for the Iraq War itself.
During this mission — which results in the soldiers being engulfed by suffocating panic, dizzying trauma, and nauseating mutilation — the actors display such gut-wrenching emotional commitment that their performances feel born on the field of battle. Their intensity and unpredictability are matched only by that of the surrounding scenario, whose soundscape is defined by chilling silence that gives way to gunshots and explosions that scream through the air at defeating volume (to say nothing of the actual, human screams that follow from within their camp). Given its subjective unveiling, the SEALs’ guns are infinitely louder than the gentle rat-tat-tats of their attackers in the distance. The threat to their lives is real, but through its sound design, the movie frames the U.S. troops as the far more advanced and well-equipped faction in this battle, gesturing toward its political asymmetry without mentioning it explicitly.
The film’s use of verbal language is further indicative not only of the soldiers’ in-group mechanics — they speak in largely impenetrable code — but also, their outlook on who they’re fighting. There are seldom “insurgents,” “attackers,” or “hostiles” on their rooftop or across the street, waiting for them to slip up. There are only “bad guys,” as they call them. Which, inherently, makes the soldiers the “good guys” in their own minds, but the movie’s visual framing has more to say about this binary.
Iraqi characters seldom appear. The aforementioned family is often out of frame, while the insurgents are rendered invisible by the fog of war. However, the troops’ local scouts and translators, Farid (Nathan Altai) and Sidar (Heider Ali), are a key part of the action at first. But when all these characters do show up on screen, they’re usually pushed into the background or the margins of the frame, invisible to the U.S. troops (who relegate them to their peripheries), but they remain visible to the camera all the while, very much in focus, if only for fleeting moments. As the soldiers secure the top floor of the dwelling, they force Farid and Sider downstairs, closer to the danger, and eventually out the front door before the rest of them, emphasizing a caste system of whose lives matter most — and least.
These tinges of regret infect the movie’s unfurling when things go completely awry. In a darkly comedic twist that verges on upsetting, even human remains and maimed bodies are treated with hypocrisy, depending on who they belong to — a discrepancy that seldom goes unnoticed by the cinema vérité lens, as wielded by cinematographer David J. Thompson. This double standard becomes a shockingly normal part of the soldiers’ operating procedure, wherein recovering U.S. military equipment is of greater importance than protecting Iraqi lives.
The violence of the movie rests just as much in its tension as it does in the actual gunfire.
Of course, the presence of these details doesn’t prevent Warfare from being propaganda, if only in the most technical sense. A movie such as this, filled with so much U.S. military equipment and garb, doesn’t get made without approval from the Department of Defense, who hold the trademarks to their imagery, and whose Hollywood production wing consults on everything from films on classified operations, like Zero Dark Thirty (on which the CIA had notable script input), to the Marvel Cinematic Universe (as far back as Iron Man). There’s only so far Warfare can go as a counter-narrative to the existing norms of Hollywood’s default worship of U.S. militarism, and its demonization of Muslims in the Middle East. Perhaps keeping the latter group relatively invisible — and having their visual marginalization speak for itself — is the preferable alternative, but the film’s thematic pull-and-push between lauding and demolishing this status quo causes an intriguing meta-textual wrinkle. Each moment seems to rest on a knife’s edge, resulting in a tectonic stress where both narrative possibilities exist in fragile union.
However, this tension is also vital to Warfare as a work of personal retrospective. It comes from a place of real Navy SEALs reliving their worst nightmares, as the camera pulls back (if only slightly) to contextualize what fueled their gut-wrenching conundrum to begin with, and the bone-deep physical and emotional scars it would leave.
Warfare is ultimately at war with itself.
It's impossible (and usually inadvisable) to separate a war movie from its politics. However, a closer focus on the characters inevitably reveals — in distinctly intimate hues — just how petrifying the experience of war can be, and how exposed one can feel for extended periods. The characters’ mere presence is voyeuristic, in an almost self-reflexive way. That they can so easily place innocent bystanders in their crosshairs — turning them into potential subjects of carnage — makes them incredibly dangerous, but Garland and Mendoza subsequently turn the camera on them in much the same way.
In most movies, to be seen by the camera is to be understood — to be emotionally vulnerable. In Warfare, to be glimpsed is to be naked to the world, practically inviting retribution. To be looked at, by a person or by the camera, is to become a lamb for slaughter, a through line Garland dramatized in Civil War as well. Here, he turns the Hollywood voyeurism so often applied to the Middle East and its denizens on its head, twisting the lens 180 degrees until the watchers become the watched. Every movement the camera captures in Warfare feels hostile and dangerous, making it one of the most visceral, riveting, heart-pounding war movies Hollywood has seen in a very long time.
