Co-writers and directors Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland’s Warfare is a film which challenges the audience to have difficult conversations about its subject matter regarding the Iraq War, and it doesn’t seem to necessarily care whether or not you like or dislike it as a movie. To be clear, I like this movie very much. I just think there is something deeper going on in this film than a purely artistic conversation. I will try my best to blend the two.
I feel like I was the only person in the world to dislike Garland’s Civil War, which in many ways feels like a cousin to Warfare. It was the first film of Garland’s I didn’t care for after his remarkable trifecta of Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Men. My issue with Civil War was that I felt it lacked the intellectual heft of those previous films, settling for a message which felt very noncommittal and centrist in its lack of specificity. A Seal Team 5 member and military training instructor for 16 years before breaking into Hollywood, Mendoza clearly wrote this film from a very personal lens. In that way, Warfare feels insanely specific, and therefore I see it as a return to form for Garland. It’s satisfying both as an intellectual exercise and an emotional one because of this specificity, and Garland’s contribution appears to be a reflexive, almost meta-textual voice which permeates the entire film. Our reactions are tested just as much as the soldiers (based on Ray’s real-life comrades) in this searingly tense situation.
The ensemble includes Will Poulter, Charles Melton, D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai, Joseph Quinn, Cosmo Jarvis, and Michael Gandolfini, just to name a few. We see these soldiers take over a civilian home in Ramadi, Iraq during the final stages of the Battle of Ramadi in late November 2006. From there, they plan to kill an unsuspecting suspected terrorist group — that is, until things go completely sideways and the entire block is engulfed in gunfire. The ways Mendoza and Garland sustain tension with zero music and painstaking attention to the details of sound design are breathtaking. In any other film, many moments of Warfare would come off as cheap jump scares, but here, they are powerful reminders of how quickly any and all of this can go off the rails at any moment.
Intellectually, the film walks a tightrope between needing the audience to bring their own thoughts and feelings to it and needing to get Mendoza’s memories out. The film does not glorify the Iraq War, nor does it condemn the U.S. soldiers who fought it. It simply shows a piece of it as it was, in all its horrifying, messy, unthinkable chaos. This is why you have to bring your own feelings about the Iraq War to bear on this film: it doesn’t succeed unless it starts a conversation. Too little is known about the day-to-day realities of that war, and if we don’t know any of the details, how can we talk about it with any depth, or ever hope to have any influence on our politics to avoid these kinds of intractable conflicts? The powers that be would prefer we not talk about this war; not learn from it. Warfare is here, at least in part, to start that talking and learning process. The final shot of the film cuts incredibly deep when thinking about it through this lens. None of us have all the answers, but maybe that’s because we’re not asking the right questions. | George Napper
