A Film That Throws Out the War-Movie Playbook
The director Alex Garland’s 2024 film, Civil War, was gritty, realistic, and often horrifying to watch, but it was fundamentally a flight of fantasy. One could debate just how fanciful its near-future depiction of America going to war with itself over a president who refused to leave office was, but for all that movie’s intense effort to depict combat realistically, Garland was only imagining the reasons for it. The premise of his follow-up, Warfare, feels like a challenge the filmmaker issued to himself: What if you stripped away all the hooky plotting typical of military dramas, and just put an unembellished skirmish from a real war on-screen? Would it still work as cinema?
The answer is yes—but Warfare is without a doubt a tougher pill to swallow than its predecessor. Garland wrote and directed the movie in collaboration with Ray Mendoza, a former U.S. Navy SEAL. Mendoza served as the military adviser on Civil War and helped Garland design some of its most ambitious action sequences. Where Civil War envisioned a dark future, Warfare conjures a specific, harrowing day from Mendoza’s past. It re-creates a military operation from the 2006 Battle of Ramadi, during the Iraq War, when things went punishingly awry for Mendoza’s unit. That Warfare is, in dramatically rendering a true story, visceral is hardly a surprise. What’s fascinating is how so much of the film commits to the waiting that exists during battle: the taxing, dull tension of knowing that something might happen any minute.
Singling out Warfare’s level of patience is not to suggest that the film is boring—it’s far too stressful for that. Instead, it’s to acknowledge the film’s complete rejection of the typical storytelling rules for how to portray action: that it should have peaks and valleys throughout a three-act structure. Warfare is anticipation, then chaos, then a cooldown for relief. While watching, I kept considering Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down—a grander-scale reconstruction of real-life urban warfare, focused on the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia, which I consider a high-water mark for technical proficiency. But that movie still has much more of a Hollywood sheen to it than Garland and Mendoza’s: Black Hawk Down slowly introduces its ensemble at base camp, laying out personality types and mission specifics and showing us every level of command, from besieged grunts to steely-eyed colonels staring at monitors.
[Read: Civil War was made in anger]
Warfare has none of that exposition—it’s resolutely embedded with Mendoza’s specific unit, whose mission is only somewhat clear to the audience. The soldiers are surveilling a residence in Ramadi, hoping to clear ground for more troop movement the next day; eventually, they realize that the place next door is an insurgent base, and the group has to dig in as it’s besieged on all sides in enemy territory. Mendoza (played by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) is not positioned as more or less important than the rest of the unit, and there are no specific bits of derring-do for any of the men to help distinguish themselves. The camerawork is detached and unshowy, providing long, sometimes demanding takes and denying the viewer the respite that comes with cinematic flair.
Like Black Hawk Down, Warfare features a cast of talented, good-looking young stars on the rise, including Will Poulter, Charles Melton, Noah Centineo, Kit Connor, Joseph Quinn, and Cosmo Jarvis. Their presences in the unit are the main helpful concessions Garland and Mendoza offer the viewer, providing familiar, distinct faces to latch on to while trying to comprehend the opaque events. Still, everyone’s caked in dirt and mud and clad in camo fatigues and wraparound glasses—glitz is in short supply. There’s a thrill in trying to piece together each person’s role amid the things that are going wrong with the group’s mission; we watch the men respond differently to the unexpected attacks they face and process the tension growing within their outpost. But giving yourself over to the anxiety is just as easy. Most of these servicemen had to learn to embrace the frustration and confusion that can come with wartime conflict—such as not knowing where or even who your opponent might be—and Warfare encourages the viewer to do the same.
Neglecting to lay out the specific stakes diverges from Garland’s Civil War, an ostensibly apolitical movie about a fictional political event, that depicted the tumult through the eyes of war photographers. Civil War’s characters had essentially sworn a professional oath of impartiality, a dispassionate perspective that Garland extended to the film itself. But his preference for letting the audience make up its own mind was frustrating for the many viewers who wanted Civil War to take more of a stance. Warfare is even more bluntly neutral. Mendoza and Garland don’t so much as hint at why these soldiers have signed up for combat, or at their level of personal investment in the purpose of their mission; they spend no time on sermonizing about the Iraq War’s morality, or ratifying any audience member’s belief on the topic, as similar historical war films often do.
[Read: Alex Garland knows you might hate Men]
Instead, Warfare is a memory play, an intimate portrait of one of Mendoza’s personal recollections. But the bitter reality of what unfolds over 90 or so minutes during this challenging day—all of that waiting around between the gunfire—is enough to get the viewer thinking about the incremental, tedious surrealism of war. Warfare depicts a circumstance that many audiences would likely never want to experience; it’s all the more crucial, then, to stare down the frightening ambiguity without narrative assuagement.