Warfare

Screenwriter turned writer/director Alex Garland has always been great with a high-concept premise, but I've never considered him much of a storyteller. His latest eliminates the need for traditional storytelling and focuses entirely on visceral experience. Warfare, a military action film set during the Iraq War, is co-written and directed by Garland and former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza and is essentially a real-time, beat-for-beat re-enactment of an intense firefight he and Mendoza's platoon experienced in the wake of the Battle of Ramadi in 2006. A group of SEALs on a surveillance mission takes control of a multi-story house in that city. The Officer in Charge (Will Poulter) has the team's Iraqi translators (Nathan Altai and Donya Hussen) keep the family whose home they've commandeered still and quiet. Sniper Elliot Miller (Cosmo Jarvis) monitors the seemingly normal neighborhood, and communications officer Ray Mendoza (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) transmits information back to his superiors. All is quiet, too quiet. Then a grenade is tossed in through a window, and suddenly, these guys are pinned down by faceless Iraqi insurgents.

There's very little in the way of character development, narrative, or political viewpoint in Warfare. It's a testament to the excellent young cast that we can keep track of all the characters so well, and to the filmmakers for making the tight 95-minute action film so credibly suspenseful. However, it's frustrating that this movie has so little to say about its titular subject other than the stuff we always hear about how most soldiers fight for their brothers in arms rather than for any specific ideology. The movie provides a vicarious, you-are-there thrill ride for viewers who don't actually have to be there. There's some value in that. It is unquestionably intense, though its power diminishes over the short running time rather than ratcheting up.

In a standard war film, the events depicted here would be an extended sequence within a larger story that contextualizes what we see and gives us more to think about and reflect on. I can't call Warfare a purer kind of war picture than a traditional war movie because it doesn't feel like it gets to the heart of why men fight, why nations engage in warfare, or anything along those lines. So many recent films seem to have given up on exploring those themes. The Hurt Locker (2009) and Hacksaw Ridge (2016) are the last contemporary war films I can remember that explored why men fight rather than just how men fight. Still, Warfare is shot and staged far more credibly than most of the first-person-shooter style action pictures we've gotten of late—1917 being the most extreme case—and the characters don't feel as disposable as those in movies of that ilk.

As expected, the film ends with footage showing the real guys whose memories the script is based on. This extended sequence of behind-the-scenes footage and comparison photographs serves as a kind of reunion for the guys who lived the event this movie depicts. I rarely think this kind of ending is a good choice for fact-based films, but it's especially distancing here. Rather than connecting us with "the real people," it undercuts whatever connection we may have made with the fictionalized characters we've just been watching. Movies like Warfare take us inside a war zone and make us feel like we were there, but the post-film/pre-credit, behind-the-scenes footage pulls us right back out and separates us from the very people it wants us to relate to and empathize with. We almost feel like, by watching this coda, we've been intruding on something that was made more for them than for us. Epilogues like this are almost always better left for bonus features on DVDs or streaming platforms, where they can play out at a decent enough length to see people as people, rather than give quick glimpses as if the film requires some kind of proof that what it depicts really happened.