Warfare review
Director: Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland
Writers: Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland
Stars: D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis and Kit Connor
Running Time: 95 minutes
Please note there may be spoilers below
For the scores of films claiming to be ‘anti-war’ films, Ray Mendoza’s and Alex Garland’s Warfare has a strong argument, not least because it is a film I don’t particularly want to experience a second time. This should be the criteria, really, for how we determine a film’s anti-war credentials: it’s lack of rewatchability. By definition, an anti-war film should provide us such a distaste for wartime trauma that the idea of streaming it at home on a Saturday evening feels like a step too far, a recipe for a sleepless night.
Set largely in a single house in Iraq, and based on the real memories of a Navy SEAL platoon in 2006, Warfare has placed upon itself the kind of boundaries that force creative and authentic choices. The story is told in genuine real-time, a minute to minute depiction of a combat encounter that offers scant relief from the reality of breathing the dust of war. While I expected a more robust, military-favouring experience, what I got was something much more unsettling, a biography of war wounds and logistical mishaps, the goal of which is too provide discomfort and impede easy solutions. For Mendoza and Garland, docudrama authenticity is a higher priority than entertainment. Even language itself if not for the audience’s benefit – here we get steeped immediately in the abbreviations and terminology of jarheads: IEDs CASEVACs, JTACs, and ‘show of force’ are part of a lexicon we have to learn to keep up.
Co-director Ray Mendoza, an Iraq war veteran himself, previously a military adviser on Alex Garland’s Civil War, is played by D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, a baby-faced communications officer who uses air support to monitor insurgent activity, and he’s joined by an impressive case including Will Poulter and Cosmo Jarvis, who for years have proven their on-screen abilities in stellar work like Kathryn Bigelow’s Detroit or Nick Rowland’s Calm with Horses. The platoon take refuge inside a multi-story Iraqi home, waking up a young sleeping family and reminding us that this is a story of occupation. All effective war movies contain elements of boredom (Das Boot perfects this), and Warfare paces itself effectively by taking us through the languid reality of a sniper unit recording the comings and goings of potential targets. As with most films set in a single location, the dramatic device is dread, the dread of slowly building chaos by way of small moments of danger-laced detail.
“Now almost 20 years on from the event, it’s fortunate Garland and Mendoza do form some broader opinions on the senselessness of the era.”
Once an unexpected grenade explodes and an IED is detonated, the sniper unit is washed in trauma and its aftershocks. Almost in opposition to a work like Black Hawk Down, Warfare is dedicated to the de-glamorisation of skill-based warfare – within the first act, Office in Charge Erik (Poulter) is rendered incapable of leading the team, shell-shocked into disorientation but still cruelly aware enough to compute his inability. The focus becomes one of wounds – the legs of Elliott (Jarvis) and Sam (Joseph Quinn) are appallingly wounded. Minute to minute, as the platoon recover from prolonged hearing daze and cough their way through the clouds of smoke and dust, the act of dragging both wounded men is one of unadorned pain – the soundtrack focuses on their screaming almost endlessly, and the sense of detail is awful and believable: the sight of Elloitt’s leg bending unnaturally around a wall-corner feels particularly like a memory from Mendoza that could only come from direct experience.
Warfare follows this with the depiction of how unprepared we are to see horror of such magnitude. Consistently we hear the deep, grunted breathing of both injured men between their regular cries to God for the pain to stop. It’s obvious no military unit is medically prepared to effectively help people in such cases, and so Warfare requires us to live through the real-time wait for help and the hellish helplessness of exposed flesh and bone. Often war movies contain isolated scenes of medical horror, but Warfare is positively steeped in it, each minute deserving another gasp for the amount of pain the human body can endure. Labored breathing is such a repetitive motif – the loud gasping for air, either through post-grenade concrete dust, the sand-laden air outside, or the debris covered faces of wounded men, there’s isn’t much running time that isn’t steeped in the rasping for clean peace-time oxygen.
Whilst focusing on a micro-event, there is also enough space here for some macro-editorializing. Now almost 20 years on from the event, it’s fortunate Garland and Mendoza do form some broader opinions on the senselessness of the era. In an effort to request a casualty evacuation (CASEVAC), Officer in Charge Jake asks his communications officer to pretend to be a commanding officer on the radio to have their evacuation approved. It’s a reminder that when people are dying, even the hardened military hierarchy is to be disregarded when the morality of suffering is on the line. And the suffering creates enough discomfort that their ruse is a relief that maybe this nightmare can end sooner. In a way, so much of Warfare is about affirming the literal decline of young men in large stories of morbid political calculus, and I can’t help but feel a micro-angled view of detailed and horrific combat is the best way of disarming the mythology that politicians continue to sow. Maybe depicting corruption is not half as effective as showing the far-away results of what it steals from the young.
By the final scene, the editorializing is clear. It seems particularly necessary that for a few soft, quiet moments, we spend time with the very Iraqi family who owns this house. Now empty, bloodstained, bomb-shelled and clouded in dust, we see that even once the casualties are evacuated and the noises of suffering cease, the unexpected silence that’s left is one for Iraq’s people to make sense of.
