‘Warfare’ May Be the Most Viscerally Realistic Combat Movie Ever Made

The first half of ‘Warfare’ is dull but also tense; the second half is a nightmare of bullets, blood, smoke, and men screaming. Countless movies have told us that war is hell, in a variety of ways. But none of them have been as realistic, almost photorealistic, as ‘Warfare.’ It’s a modern masterpiece of terse, tight, macho filmmaking, and possibly the most true-life war film ever made.

Alex Garland is the actual director of ‘Warfare’, but the guiding light of the movie is Ray Mendoza, an ex-Navy SEAL who co-directed the movie and co-wrote it with Garland based on Mendoza’s experiences in Iraq in the aughts. The entire movie, other than a brief prologue showing the soldiers fun-dancing to a sexy 1980s aerobics video, takes place over 36 hours or so in Ramadi, in the wake of a battle. A platoon of SEALS occupy a house. Iraqis attack them. They try to get out alive. And that’s it. You get no backstory on any of the soldiers They have no personality other than macho grit and panic. These are soldiers at work.

WARFARE ★★★★★ (5/5 stars)
Directed by: Alex Garland, Ray Mendoza
Written by: Alex Garland, Ray Mendoza
Starring: Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, Cosmo Jarvis, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Ti, Michael Gandolfini
Running time: 95 mins

The script is mostly logistics, there are no “tell my girl I love her monologues.” Mendoza is essentially recreating a situation that he encountered, beat by beat. The soldiers are kinetic. It’s a realistic war ballet. The cast, who have nothing to go on other than to look determined, scared, or both, is extraordinary. Will Poulter is excellent as a platoon leader whose best-laid plans go to shit. Other names you might recognize include Joseph Quinn, Michael Gandolfini, Noah Centineo, and Cosmo Jarvis. But in the fog of war, they are nameless soldiers. One of them was called “Tommy.” I don’t remember the rest of the names. They aren’t important.

There are “shows of force,” tanks, grenades, and vicious guns. None of them do a damn bit of good. The family whose house the SEALS occupy cower in the bedroom. At one point, a woman approaches the soldiers and screams “WHY? WHY?” It’s a good question, about the entire Iraq experience, but that’s not a question that these grunts, adrift in the existential nightmare of war, can answer.

Garland’s last movie, Civil War, was a paranoid fantasy about a continental United States caught up in a pointless armed conflict. The script was stupid but the battle scenes were definitely gripping. Now we see that movie was a companion piece to Warfare, about a war that actually happened, and basically for no good reason. In Civil War, Garland’s sympathies lay with photojournalists, which is fine, but here, he is sympathetic both to the soldiers who fought in Iraq and to the ordinary Iraqis who they occupied. Never has a filmmaker depicted the fog of war with such moral clarity. In the restroom after the movie, I heard a couple of young guys discussing it. “Why were they even in that house?” one guy asked. That is the multi-billion-dollar question.

Warfare is not fun to watch, and I don’t recommend it if you suffer from PTSD. But it’s as good a war movie as you’ll ever see. It will quickly turn you into a pacifist.