Alex Garland has now constructed what could be called his trilogy of violence: the relentless, patriarchal assault in horror Men (2022), the total collapse of American society in Civil War (2024), and, now, the immediate aftermath of an IED explosion in Warfare. There’s little to no context to be offered in these films. The point, entirely, is what’s felt in the moment – the fear, the pain, the blood. Garland’s approach is understandable but limited. Warfare, at least, is the most successful of the three, because its myopia is a crucial part of its structure.
While filming Civil War, Garland was introduced to Iraq war veteran Ray Mendoza, who’d been hired to make sure the film’s gunfight sequences looked as realistic as possible. In November 2006, Mendoza had been part of a team of Navy Seals who, alongside two Iraqi scouts and two marines, were left cornered in a residential home in Ramadi province after the detonation of an IED resulted in multiple deaths and life-threatening injuries.
He and Garland began work on a screenplay that painstakingly reconstructed his memories and those of his comrades in order to create what he termed a “living document” for Elliott Miller, one of the men injured, who has no recollection of the incident. As its credits insist, the film aims for “as much accuracy as memory allows”. It is a work of attempted neutrality, co-directed by both Garland and Mendoza. There’s no musical score to manipulate its audience’s emotions; no sympathetic backstories for any of its characters.
Instead, Warfare is concerned only with the overwhelming, sensory journey that is conflict. We start raucously, as a squad of young men bark at the leotard-clad women engaged in sexually provocative aerobics in the infamous video to Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me”. A sudden cut, and we’re plunged into the silence of a nighttime operation, which then stretches achingly into the hours of subsequent observation, as Miller (Cosmo Jarvis) peers down the sniper scope, breathing as steady and loud as a beating drum. It’s an odd state to be in, equal parts boredom and hypervigilance.
Chaos erupts. We’re plunged into the muffled sounds and smoke-blurred vision of those caught up in the blast. An incessant stream of chatter from the radio comms, issuing coded and conflicted orders, collides with screams of the injured (Joseph Quinn, as one of the said injured, has one of the most haunting, visceral screams in recent cinema).
We feel the external world start to collapse when Mendoza (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) disassociates. In a cast packed to the rafters with young talent – Will Poulter, Kit Connor, Michael Gandolfini, Noah Centineo, Charles Melton, among others – it’s Woon-A-Tai’s comparatively quiet, introverted presence that grounds the film. He draws the camera in closer, towards the scars forming in real-time within his soul. We don’t know where these men came from or where they will go from here.
All Warfare has to offer, inevitably, is the violence itself, stripped from its source, like Men and Civil War before it. If the point is to warn us of its monstrousness, what can a film of this ilk offer if it bears no clues as to the origins of its birth?
Garland and Mendoza do, at least in this instance, make careful, considerate use of the film’s framework. We’re shown how US soldiers invade the home of an Iraqi family who, for the rest of Warfare’s duration, are held hostage in a downstairs bedroom, guns routinely thrust into their faces. In its final scene, they reemerge into the rubble of what was once their home, their lives upended by US forces and then abandoned without a second thought. It’s quite the metaphor.
But Warfare isn’t about their memories, nor those of the two Iraqi scouts (Rayhan Ali and Heider Ali), who suffer in ways the film never bothers to reflect on. For a project so invested in the idea of objectivity, there are gaps in the story clearly felt and reflected on screen. This moment, this sudden eruption of hell, didn’t happen in isolation – there was a path that led to it, and a path that led beyond it. Warfare’s violence feels unmoored without its context.
Dir: Ray Mendoza, Alex Garland. Starring: D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Michael Gandolfini, Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton. 94 minutes
‘Warfare’ is in cinemas from 18 April
