‘Warefare’ Is an Unsentimental and Often Unflattering Portrayal of Modern Combat

Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza's film isn't exactly 'A Bridge Too Far.'

Over the decades, many filmmakers have endeavored to create the most realistic war picture ever made; with Warfare, Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza may have actually pulled it off. Garland, of course, is the writer of movies like 28 Days Later and Sunshine and the writer/director of such films as Ex Machina and Men; Mendoza is a former Navy SEAL who acted as the military advisor on Garland’s most recent offering, Civil War, and whose experiences during the 2006 Battle of Ramadi are the basis for this story. Warfare is free of bells and whistles; it is unsentimental, about as apolitical as any narrative about armed conflict could ever hope to be, and sometimes unflattering to the men it portrays.

Most of Warfare plays out in real-time, as a platoon of Navy SEALS attempts to stave off an attack by Iraqi insurgents from inside a home they’ve seized. None of the characters get backstories, and good luck catching more than two or three names (I earnestly didn’t realize one of the actors was playing Mendoza until after the movie; I’m not sure anyone ever calls him “Mendoza,” “Ray,” or any other proper noun). What we learn about the characters we learn exclusively from their behavior just before and then during the onslaught. We get to see their easy camaraderie and casual familiarity in the twenty minutes or so leading up to the attack, and we get to see their reaction to stress during the attack, and that’s it. To say that the characters in Black Hawk Down get to share comparatively Dostoyevskyian biographical information would be understating it somewhat.

In fact, early in the film, I felt resistant to the casting choices, many of whom are, if not exactly movie stars, on the path to being movie stars (including Will Poulter from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Joseph Quinn from Gladiator II, Cosmo Jarvis from Shogun, Michael Gandolfini from Daredevil: Born Again, Charles Melton from May December, D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai from Reservation Dogs, Noah Centineo from Black Adam, and Taylor John Smith from Where the Crawdads Sing). Why remind us, amid a movie striving for such authenticity, that it’s still just a bunch of boys playing at war? But by the time the credits rolled, I understood the logic of sacrificing verisimilitude for recognizability: if you didn’t know all these dudes from other stuff, you might have a really hard time remembering who’s who.

There are a few elements frequent viewers of this genre will recognize, mostly in the form of the SEALs’ ludicrous, theatrical displays of testosterone: when we first meet them, they’re gathered around a television, watching the ridiculous, hyper-sexual, aerobics-centric music video for Eric Prydz’s “Call On Me” (the kind of thing mercilessly satirized by The Substance), and when one sniper fails to identify a viable shot of an enemy, his peers snicker, “Weak.”

But that machismo falls by the wayside as soon as the shooting starts. The acts of heroism in Warfare are, by the standards of your average Hollywood war film, modest; the graphic violence is neither titillating nor triumphant; and the movie doesn’t shy away from showing decidedly not-macho moments of shock, human error, callousness, and cowardice. In one scene, a character trying to administer morphine to a severely injured peer accidentally tries to jab the needle upside down, thus injecting the morphine into his own thumb instead; in another sequence, the highest ranking member of the platoon, recognizing that he has frozen in the face of extreme duress, asks to be demoted. When one SEAL tells another that his wound is “just a paper cut,” the hurt seal doesn’t rally - he continues to lay on the ground and howl from a mix of agony and terror. When the platoon needs a C.O.’s approval to get tanks for evacuation, one of them just impersonates the C.O. rather than wait around for permission. It may seem like a small, silly detail, but at one point, they have to put a tourniquet around a leg that’s been blown wide open in an explosion, and when they tear the injured man’s pants open to do so, his genitals are on full display. A Bridge Too Far this ain’t.

Then there’s the platoon’s treatment of the Iraqis. Their racism is tacit, not explicit: none of them use slurs or other dehumanizing language, for example. But the Iraqis they’ve employed as translators worry they’re being used as canaries in the coal mine, and not without reason, and the two families who inhabit the annexed house are confined to a bedroom, where they’re watched by armed guards and threatened when they either disobey or dare to question why their home has been overrun and blown to hell by a foreign military. Without giving too much away, their final scene is tragic, not because any of them are physically harmed, but because of the slack indifference with which they’re forgotten. Indeed, part of what makes Warfare so powerful is that its conflict - the objective of which is never made clear to us - ends with neither a bang nor a whimper, but, rather, a shrug.

The only aspect of Warfare that feels false is a brief epilogue which features exactly the kind of jingoistic, hoo-rah messaging the film otherwise manages to avoid. This may have been a necessary evil: Mendoza was, after all, a part of this platoon, and the characters are all based on real people, some of whom suffered horribly in this conflict. It’s the only shortcoming of what is otherwise likely one of the most harrowing combat films ever made.