Warfare opens with a date and a location: November 11, 2006, in Ramadi, Iraq. We learn only the slightest hint of the situation on the ground: SEAL team Alpha One is moving through hostile territory. Then the film frames itself as a historical document based on a true story, telling us, “This film uses only their memories.” Warfare works to replicate what Alpha One endured in real time: the boredom before action, the adrenaline and fear and pain—especially the pain—afterward. The film buries us deep in the heads of the team as they fight for their lives, then leaves us wondering what it was all for.
Alex Garland and his codirector/cowriter Ray Mendoza—on whose memories the movie is built—maintain a tight focus on the battle and the battle only. They drop us into an unfamiliar neighborhood, on an unfamiliar street, with Alpha One as the soldiers choose a house in which to stay as they calculate their next move. Tonally, the film is clinical and matter-of-fact, uninterested in introducing its characters by name or in translating military jargon. This storytelling choice emphasizes the tight-knit nature of the team as they work together, and that simultaneously holds outsiders at a remove. We don’t know who these men are.
We still feel all of their pain and confusion in the heat of combat. Mendoza and Garland push the camera directly next to their characters’ heads, or else flip it into a tight reverse-shot of the things they see through the scopes of their rifles: we’re supposed to see what they see and feel what they feel. But there’s no interest in anything outside of the ninety minutes of battle, and the film feels divorced from its context as a result: a situational report told in real time with no lead-up and no takeaways.
One of the prevalent critiques of Garland’s previous film, Civil War, was that it, too, was uninterested in context. In that film, we’re given enough details to know that the United States is being ripped apart by various warring factions, though at any given moment we likely don’t know whose side the soldiers are on. The lack of sociopolitical background in Civil War allows the story to focus more clearly on its journalist main characters, to probe at the psychic wounds created by documenting violence as it happens. By contrast, Warfare is the recreation of a single battle, though it documents the story with a detachment that feels less like an understanding gaze and more like a reflexive flinch.
And the film does flinch. The flinching is understandable, given its brutal violence; on a technical level, the filmmaking is effective and efficient. Alpha One becomes pinned down in the house, two of their own severely wounded with their legs shredded by an IED detonation. The men have been moving in sync with one another before the explosion; as the dust clears, we return to each of them one at a time. The sound cuts out as they wake up, then slowly returns as they recover their hearing, one by one, over and over in the individual shock of the return to consciousness. It’s heady, bracing filmmaking; we might not know who these men were before battle, but we understand down to our bones how they feel in this moment. Warfare gives its characters permission to be frightened, unsure of themselves, disoriented; the battle isn’t framed as a jingoistic tale of bravery, but rather an attempt to sort out what exactly happened.
But at other times, the flinch feels unproductive. At points of high stress, the sound cuts out again, presumably a signal of rushing adrenaline, but also a pressure-release valve that relieves us from the cacophony of battle, the screams of the wounded, and the sight of their wounds. In these moments we return to a tight focus on certain characters’ faces, the noise and blood stripped away. The choice, which is repeated several times, feels at odds with the film’s goal of recreating a battle as though we’re embedded in it. The memories cut out. They’re too painful. Also painful is the soldiers’ treatment of their Iraqi translators: as tools to help them communicate, an extra pair of guns to help cover their escape, or human decoys to draw enemy fire. They seem to be an afterthought in the minds of both Alpha One and the filmmakers, just as the families who had been living in the house are brushed aside. We’re so tightly tied to the perspective of the SEAL team that anyone outside it barely counts as a person. This storytelling choice comes across as a mixture of indifference and matter-of-fact near-shame. The result is a sickening feeling in the pit of the stomach, and as the noise of the battle cuts out and returns, I wonder: what was this all for? Who is it all for?
After the battle, when the survivors make it out, Iraqi fighters fill the street in the empty space left behind by American tanks. The territory wasn’t held. The SEAL team didn’t win. What’s left is dust and bullet holes, body parts left in the street and a river of drying blood on the floor of a ruined house. The film might have seemed ambivalent up until this point, but in its final moments, it tips its hand. We cut to photographs of real-life people juxtaposed with those of the actors who played them. Half the faces, including those of the translators and the family whose house had become a battleground, are blurred out: a strange form of privacy granted after recreating what must have been one of the worst days of their lives. These people were real, part of an ugly memory; some of them didn’t live long enough to contribute their perspective to the reconstruction of the story. What we’re left with is a single viewpoint from a handful of SEAL team members. The film closes with a photograph of soldiers and cast assembled on the set of the street, raised middle fingers in the air: we lived. History gets written by and for the survivors. In this case, it feels like aimless probing of an open, untended wound.—Sarah Welch-Larson
★★☆☆
Warfare is in theaters now.