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Can Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza Remake the War Movie?
Warfare attempts to rewrite the rules of depicting violent conflict on screen, making for a close-up, visceral experience.
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Books & the Arts / May 22, 2025
Warfare attempts to rewrite the rules of depicting violent conflict on screen, making for a close-up, visceral experience.
(Courtesy of A24)Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare takes that typically spurious tagline—“based on a true story”—as its measure of quality, re-creating over its trim 95-minute run time a failed US Navy SEALs operation in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006. Eschewing the dramatic conventions of military movies about the War on Terror, Warfare sticks to a single incident, drawing from the memories of the US veterans (including Mendoza) who were on the ground in Ramadi at the time.
The operation begins with a group of SEALs creeping down the opposite sides of an empty block. The squad leader, Erik (Will Poulter), quickly identifies a suitable base—a two-story civilian home—and signals his comrades to infiltrate the building, which involves hammering through a brick wall and poking the slumbering members of an Iraqi family awake with their guns. The soldiers speak to the civilians in a firm, measured tone, but the camera, which captures the terrified family huddling in corners and illuminated like deer in headlights, makes clear that this is nothing more than a home invasion.
By morning, the SEAL unit has taken over the household: We see the soldiers milling around impatiently, listening to the radio, tracking the movements of the denizens of Ramadi on a portable surveillance system that covers several blocks around their location. It’s never clear why they’re here or what the nature of their mission is, which is by design. Instead, Garland and Mendoza depict the frankly boring tasks that make up surveillance ops, the sitting and waiting for something unknown. Elliot (Cosmo Jarvis), a sniper and senior member of the unit, peers at the seemingly innocuous street activity through the scope of his weapon. Then a “call to jihad” is heard booming from nearby loudspeakers; women and children rush indoors, and a bomb is suddenly thrown into the room where Elliot and several others are huddled. The explosion leaves Elliot with a minor hand injury that nevertheless warrants his evacuation—an apparently simple task that’s revealed to demand rigorous coordination. There’s a minute-by-minute countdown to the arrival of their evac (a tank), which will stop directly outside the home but still expose the men to enemy fire, as well as an ear-ringing “show of force” in which a combat aircraft zooms over the block to intimidate enemy combatants into taking cover. The men, including two Iraqi interpreters who’ve joined the operation, wait anxiously near the front door until they’re commanded to run out one by one.
When they do, it ends badly: The interpreters are quite literally blown to pieces, and two members of the unit, Elliot and Sam (Joseph Quinn), are mangled by shrapnel. The other soldiers manage to pull them back inside, but the bottom halves of their bodies are pulverized, warranting a second, even more stressful and urgent evacuation attempt, scored to the sound of the wounded soldiers’ anguished wails. The enemy combatants are largely invisible because of the film’s intentionally insular point of view, with the camera seemingly taking the perspective of an unseen soldier when it’s not zoomed in on the contorted faces of the injured and traumatized. Because of this narrow perspective and the limited nature of the action—a charged series of attempts to leave the battlefield as opposed to “fighting” in the conventional sense—Warfare feels more like a disaster flick than a straightforward war movie (one that, ironically, dramatizes the difficulty of retreat). The line so carefully toed in Warfare, between respect for the veterans’ suffering and reproval of its brutal context, speaks to the uncertain conditions under which post-9/11 war movies might work as entertainment for American audiences today.
Explicitly marketed as a “different kind of war movie” (to crib the language used by Will Poulter during the film’s press tour), Warfare fulfills this vague promise: It is emotionally unvarnished and minimalistic compared to other films set in Iraq and Afghanistan over the past 20 years. Most obviously, these include the straightforwardly jingoistic fare—like Lone Survivor (2013) and 12 Strong (2018)—whose characters’ brawny machismo makes their grueling tribulations seem fantastic, reaffirming the heroism and nobility of the warrior class.
The most acclaimed films in this contemporary subgenre, however, make legible the dubious aims and sacrifices involved, echoing to varying degrees the same arguments made by anti-war war films like Platoon (1986) and Full Metal Jacket (1987) that challenged the romanticization of military conflict. After 9/11 and the revelations of prisoner torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib, the idea of America’s righteous retaliation was complicated by a growing awareness of its moral failures—something that Hollywood (as with its treatment of the Vietnam War) baked into its most sophisticated war movies.
Zero Dark Thirty (2012), a procedural drama about the CIA’s manhunt for Osama bin Laden, depicts the torture of suspected Al Qaeda members and questions the efficacy of these grisly acts in obtaining intel. American Sniper (2014), the highest-grossing war movie of all time, certainly valorizes its hero, the decorated Navy SEAL marksman Chris Kyle. Yet his triumphs across four tours in Iraq are tempered by the sections of the film dedicated to his family life, which emphasize his psychological deterioration. (Kyle would ultimately be killed in Texas by a fellow PTSD-plagued veteran.) Both of these award-winning films underscore the ambiguity (and, to an extent, the futility) of war, the self-defeating outgrowth of national trauma. And yet their questionable claims to verisimilitude and complexity—Zero Dark Thirty was created in consultation with CIA officials, and American Sniper is based on Kyle’s memoir of the same name—lean on empathy rather than ethics; their insights into the specifics of modern warfare offer merely fresh devices with which to signal the spiritual damages of war.
Mendoza, a former Navy SEAL, had been working as a technical consultant and combat choreographer for video games and films (such as Lone Survivor) before meeting Garland on the set of Civil War (2024), an egregiously slick speculative fiction about a war-ravaged United States. With its relatively pared-down style, Warfare is at least distinct from (and superior to) Garland’s previous two features (including Men, from 2022)—both ham-fisted attempts to connect with the cultural zeitgeist.
The post-9/11 war movie has never been more out of fashion, its lessons—of military service’s psychic (if not bodily) toll and the dubious justifications for US counterterrorism programs in the Middle East—perhaps obvious to the generation responsible for a sharp drop in military enlistment. Indeed, it’s hard not to feel guilt and revulsion toward the war movie’s orchestrated spectacle of death and destruction, and that’s especially the case for films set within a contemporary context that still resonates with US foreign policy and its blatant Islamophobia. With this in mind, Warfare’s immersive perspective is its claim to a more ethical stance than its predecessors. As in recent historical war movies like Dunkirk (2017) and 1917 (2019) that rely on first-person experience, Warfare’s experiential approach underscores the soldiers’ struggle for survival—rather than acts of combat and valor that might ennoble their cause.
Likewise, the film’s choice of performers—recruited from fandom’s corners of the Internet—reaffirms the tragic youthfulness of the average recruit. Warfare’s opening scene reminds us that the unit’s members—including rom-com darlings like Kit Connor and Noah Cinteneo—aren’t lean, mean killing machines but goofy boys: We see them laughing and grooving to a kitschy aerobics video from the 1980s, their joyous party sesh stirring our sympathies before the coming horrors.
In the thick of the evacuation, blurred lenses, slow-motion camera movements, and a piercing feedback whine conjure the men’s rattled psyches, throwing us momentarily into the blinding muck of their predicament before pulling us out to show their struggle—their need—to snap out of it. As such, the film is a portrait of male vulnerability, akin to male weepies like the wrestling drama The Iron Claw that showcase the physical and emotional toll of masculine performance. In stories like these, there’s nothing to be gained from such displays of strength and resilience beyond brotherly bonding and mutual support.
When squad leader Erik—either concussed or mentally paralyzed as his men bleed out on the floor—declares himself incapable of calling the shots, Jake (Charles Melton), the leader of the second unit that arrives midway through the film, takes charge, exhibiting an almost tender display of understanding and camaraderie. Melton brings a vital mix of control, confidence, and boyish reserve to his part as the leader of the bruised, bumbling lads (one lieutenant, played by Michael Gandolfini, accidentally stabs himself with a morphine pen when attempting to inject Elliot). Jake’s assuredness, to Melton’s credit, also feels like a recent development; he’s no super-soldier, just the one who’s best at managing to stay calm.
Under Jake’s leadership, the men successfully evacuate, but as they make their final sweep of the house before storming out the front door, we hear the cries of one of the home’s inhabitants: “Why?” Mendoza and Garland know, of course, that there’s no good answer, which is why the reasons for the operation are never explained. The home invasion; the killed and disabled men; the terrible, haunting memories—all purposeless and inexplicable.
Everything the film dramatizes, Mendoza and Garland have said, comes from the recollections of Mendoza and his fellow SEALs; the script was crafted to resemble “true reportage” and to avoid dramatic embellishment. This not only distinguishes Warfare from other war movies; it sets Mendoza apart from the other ex-SEALs who have infiltrated Hollywood (Chris Kyle but also Marcus Luttrell, whose fabulist memoir was adapted into Lone Survivor). Warfare’s commitment to truth is bolstered by its factual accuracy and sense of immersion—the coded language and radio jargon incorporated into the dialogue without explanation; the close attention to military procedure in everything from the way the soldiers move through the streets to their protocols for retrieving items from spaces exposed to gunfire.
But does Warfare’s painstaking realism preclude its gratifications? I would argue that its supposedly anti-war ethos, rooted in its re-creation of events as they were lived and felt by some of those involved, simply offers a different set of pleasures than those typically summoned by more spectacular war movies. And they are thrilling in their own way.
Warfare’s careful attention to the details changes our relationship to war movies from that of bloodthirsty spectators to anthropologists and reenactors. We may not be enraptured by heroics, but there’s something intoxicating about the film’s meticulous rendering of combat, coolly stripped of operatics as if to quell a troubled conscience with the assurance that this is real and we are learning. The bottom line—that war is pointless and traumatic—nevertheless remains consistent with that of past films about the Iraq War; after all, Ramadi, the setting for Warfare and several others, was overtaken by the extremist group ISIS after US troops evacuated in 2011. (Iraqi forces recaptured it in 2016 with the help of US advisers and air strikes, though there wasn’t much to take back after such relentless bombing.) “There’s no such thing as an anti-war war movie” goes the truism, but Warfare is a reminder that the genre stays alive by adjusting its thrills according to public opinion.
Keep ReadingBeatrice LoayzaBeatrice Loayza is a writer and editor who contributes regularly to the Criterion Collection and publications such as The New York Times, Artforum, and 4Columns.
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