Warfare

Coming from a double writer director pair up of Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza. Warfare opens with the tagline, ‘everything is based on memory’ and follows a group of Navy Seals who use break into a random civilian house in Ramdi, Iraq, in the middle of the night to run surveillance and support for a bigger operation. They’re discovered, pinned down and wait for an extraction.

The film is a tight hour and a half, and while I don’t know anything about tactical formation or military vernacular, it all looks and sounds good. They seem to be saying all the right orders and moving in a way that I absolutely believe they’re portraying a real event. 

The set design is also great, as is the sound design – loud and unrelenting, like a visceral drug for the senses. The camerawork is tight and well-choregraphed, so it feels tactical. It all creates an adrenaline pumping story filled with action and graphic injuries. I wore headphones when I watched it – what an immersive experience. From bombs going off and fighter jets flying low over buildings to give them cover, to indiscriminate gun shots – the film engulfs you. Full marks to the sound department.

Which brings me to the cast. It’s solid. You’ve got all the up and comers, Will Poulter and Joseph Quinn, Cosmo Jarvis and Kit Connor. All that’s missing is Paul Mescal and Harris Dickenson. And credit to them, when the film is quiet, you feel the tension emanating from them all – it’s palpable. And when some of them are badly injured, it’s so well done. But I realised I was projecting my concern for the actors, not the characters they’re portraying.

This sounds odd for a film based on ‘the memories of what happened’ but it really does feel like I was supposed to have come with notes, because I still don’t know who anyone in the film is. They’re a tight group, that’s super clear, some of the actors even got matching tattoos – great. But apart from knowing who suffered the most brutal injuries, I still don’t know anything more about them. I would have loved some small titbits of info to give the film a more rounded and balanced perspective on the soldiers, so I could care more about the men they portrayed.

At its core, the film is trying to convey two ideas. One, very few on the front line want to be there. So perhaps not giving the soldiers or the family a backstory is intentional – it could all be a metaphor for any conflict. The second idea is that this based on actual events, to tell a story of the war experienced by these specific men – so I’d like to know more about them, as using the photos of the real soldiers against the actors who portrayed them in the end credits feels totally disconnected.

What does work in Warfare is giving the Iraqi family whose home they occupy more screentime. They’re literally innocent bystanders whose house is invaded by foreigners and forced to stay in a tiny room as the battle unfolds around them. I was genuinely concerned for their wellbeing and their home as it’s shot at, bombed, covered in debrief and blood, and filled with the screams of soldiers. There is poignancy to using the family as a representation of civilians around the world affected by war, who try and to escape by are trapped and forcibly restrained by the armed forces. I just truly felt for them. Their home is destroyed – intentionally bombed so the Americans can escape. This isolation and this senselessness is made more profound by the last shot of the film. The Americans are whisked away defeated, nothing gained, so much lost, as the camera lingers on the street taking in the devastation left in the wake of what exactly?

As a director Garland’s thing is to tap into bigger ideas. He tells stories with meaning, with purpose, ones that raises questions and bring you back to re-watch and discover more. My main takeaway from Warfare? War is chaos and it leaves devastation in its wake for everyone involved – not a huge leap for a war film.

This isn’t Garland’s strongest work. It’s missing a stronger why, and the message and purpose feels muddled with an inability to decide what it’s trying to do. It’s a solid adrenaline punch of warfare brought to life by a great cast and production, but it needed to take another step into something more grounded and specific, rather than being a sidecut of some his earlier work like Civil War.

Overall 2/5

Warfare is available on Prime Video if you’re subscribed.