Last year, Alex Garland’s Civil War received heavy criticism due to its lack of perspective in portraying a divided America engaged in a second civil war. The unspecified politics of its ethos in following photojournalists brought about Garland’s lack of understanding of America’s political strife. I found it hard to buy into those critiques since it begins with an authoritative president (played by Nick Offerman) proclaiming victory over a split country, and the character’s remark about the fascist practices implemented. It’s not a subtle film, especially when an unsettling Jesse Plemons questions the journalists, “What kind of American are you?” yet it never felt lacking in specificity, or a perspective not tethered to its characters.
Garland returns, this time collaborating with a co-writer and director in Ray Mendoza, a real-life veteran of the Iraq conflict, in Warfare, a movie that could similarly be critiqued for having sparse details and a lack of characters, but is rooted in a history that did happen. A conflict that many scholars and experts deemed illegal, Warfare is a film intentionally removed of all character, narrative, histrionics–which many war films have utilized in portraying the horrors of war—to convey a visceral experience of sound and sensorial intensity that requires the viewer to attribute their perceptions of the conflict and war films onto the feature.
It’s a bold, daring proposition, especially when many war films of the 2000s have tried to illustrate the conflict but failed to engage the public. Garland and Mendoza are aware that not much more insight could be gleaned from a conflict scrutinized over the last two decades, and they wisely chose not to construct a plot that involves an objective or goal.
The film follows a platoon of Navy SEALs that occupy a multi-story house in the Battle of Ramadi, 2006. Ray Mendoza (portrayed by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) is a communications specialist, alongside his team comprised of characters played by Will Poulter (Officer in Charge), Joseph Quinn (referred to as having “new guy energy” by a colleague), Cosmo Jarvis (playing Elliot Miller, a real-life corpsman that is the only person to have revealed their identity for the film), Kit Connor, Michael Gandolfini and more.
Most of these actors don’t occupy identifiable characters. The end credits display which actor represents the real-life counterparts with their faces blurred (perhaps due to privacy or still in active duty). The point here is that their names and arcs are purposefully not defined. The film is less about emotional self-actualization and more of a survival mission, as their cover is blown, and the group takes on casualties as they wait for help to arrive. The film follows them in real-time, as the ninety-minute experiment portrays the duration of their combat experience.
It’s not a substantial story; it’s an experiment that the war genre hasn’t seen much. Garland and Mendoza breathe a sort of new life into a genre of films that are all cut from the same cloth. It’s the type of art experiment reserved for small indies. Warfare doesn’t boast mega-stars or dazzling special effects, it’s an impactful spectacle of ferocious sound design and tactile filmmaking pummeling the viewers’ senses into submission.
Rather, the film forgoes all the fat and excess we love in movies in pursuit of an impressionistic memory that beckons to Mendoza’s recollection of what transpired during that fateful day. It’s not glorifying their efforts, especially when two of the seals have the lower half of their bodies and legs mangled and torn, and they scream in agonizing pain. You are simply placed “in the moment” as decisions are made, actions are executed, and the men utilize all help and assistance at their disposal.
One aspect of Civil War properly translated into Warfare is the action sequences, especially the sound design. Every decision, from opening the film silently of Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me” music video featuring hot workout women, as the seals watch in ecstatic pleasure and joy, to the tinnitus-induced sequence of an I.E.D. exploding behind a tank and stunting nearby platoon, to a show-of-force effect seals requesting a jet to fly low-down between the neighborhood to scare Iraqi fighters, as a giant cloud of sand and dust is collected by an immense sound bubble penetrating the buildings.
The bloody carnage imagery pales in comparison to what the penetrating sound soldiers must have endured. And the audience is subjected to that overwhelming design, which imparts the type of filmmaking that Garland and Mendoza are focused on. Not sensationalizing horrific brutality or movie convention theatrics, but the sensory experience of being trapped in a building as men scream in pain and fear, bullets whiz by, or rupture the concrete of the house.
The film showcases a group of young actors slowly coming into their prime, as some make memorable moments stand out. Poulter as the platoon’s leader, especially marks a damning moment, as he tells Charles Melton (the leader of another platoon coming to assist) to take control of the situation, as Poulter conveys he’s “too fucked up in the head” to take charge. It’s a small moment, in a film devoid of small character exchanges, yet it speaks volumes to how much the situation has deteriorated from the beginning.
The creative choice of not imparting any character or narrative does leave the film at a disadvantage; the film slips past the hour mark, and the action becomes repetitive, which lessens the initial impact the film had established. The more men introduced by Melton’s entrance collude with the picture of people who are non-distinct from one another, our central cast is truly lost in the midst. Again, perhaps intentionally so, but the experimentation loses its effect, and it becomes an ineffectual exercise in technical craftsmanship by the third act.
As all the carnage and firefighting ensues, the original house inhabitants, an Iraqi family, are held hostage in a room as the film sparingly shows them huddled on a bed with a few Navy Seals guarding them. Many could see this, ignoring the blatant occupation, as Garland and Mendoza choose not to portray the perspective of the civilians subjected to the madness. Yet, as the film asks the viewer not to drop their predispositions regarding the Iraq conflict, it allows us to interpret those decisions as the film is broad enough to invite a wide spectrum of critiques.
Warfare acts as its microcosm of the Iraq war: an illegal occupation of the U.S. military in the home of its inhabitants, and through orders that exceed far beyond the levels of command, place them in a zone of possible death and destruction, as the home is demolished into smithereens. At one point, a woman from the Iraqi family shouts, “Why, why, why,” as the soldiers begin their departure.
The fact that Mendoza would include that small aside in the climax of this film is an act of perspective. Maybe that’s what Mednoza can take away from the experience of this failed isolated mission: a question of “why,” as soldiers carry their wounded and leave an innocent family in the ruins of their home. Why did this need to happen? The film knows there’s no answer to justify the actions that have taken place, because Garland and Mendoza have enough self-awareness not to lecture their audience on illegal war politics under the Bush administration. Garland painted a bleak America of an authoritarian president splintering the country in Civil War. Here, he doesn’t need science fiction or exaggerated politics; Warfare is rooted in the history of a conflict that spans decades, yet this small incident feels like a footnote that Mendoza wanted to portray.
The last shot of this film feels like a perfect coda for how Mendoza feels about his time in active duty. They were men who had no control as to what they were commanded to do; they accomplished nothing by occupying the house except for death and injuries on both sides, and all the Iraqis have left are the remnants that used to be their homes. If the last shot doesn’t convey a subtle jab at anti-war sentiments, then it would be hard to approach this film with a good-faith intention.
Review Courtesy of Amritpal Rai
Feature Image Credit to A24 via Roger Ebert