The Only Victory in Warfare Is Survival

On paper, co-directors Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland’s Warfare is simple. Mendoza, a former Navy SEAL, is recreating a disastrous mission he and his unit undertook in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006. A unit of Mendoza’s platoon occupied a two-story, two-apartment home to provide overwatch for ground forces due to move through the area. Al Qaeda fighters realized the house was occupied and launched a series of attacks on the home, severely injuring several members of the unit. The SEALs, after a failed attempt to evacuate, were reinforced by another unit and ultimately managed to escape.

In practice, Warfare is an intense, uncomfortable watch. As a piece of filmmaking, it’s striking for its sparseness, relentlessness, and impeccable sound design. As a piece of propaganda, it’s trickier, given its by-design narrow focus and pointed lack of glamour. As a work of remembering by Mendoza and his SEAL peers, it’s interesting.

Warfare’s focus is deliberately microscopic. Once the unit enters the apartments in the movie’s opening minutes, Warfare stays with them for the majority of the film, which is primarily set in real time. The unit are portrayed by a talented ensemble, including Reservation Dogs’ D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai as Mendoza, as well as Charles Melton (May December), Will Poulter (The Revenant), Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things), Cosmo Jarvis (Shogun) and Michael Gandolfini (The Many Saints of Newark) among others. They’re closer to an ensemble-as-a-character rather than an ensemble of characters—moments of camaraderie (such as the unit riotously dancing to the sexually charged aerobics studio-set music video for Eric Prydz’ “Call on Me”) and tension (particularly with Iraqi translators Farid (Nathan Altai) and Noor (Donya Hussen), who are leery of being exploited by the unit) exist, but Warfare is most interested in combat and survival as group actions. The cast does good work, but by design, no one performer stands out or commands the screen.

Warfare’s dialogue is military jargon, and its action is pragmatic. While the unit surveils some of the Al Qaeda fighters who attack before combat breaks out, they are most visible via their actions, tossing grenades, exchanging gunfire with the SEALS, and in the film’s most visceral sequence, detonating a series of IEDs. This is not a film where a glorified hero stands centered in the setting sun, nor is the violence mythical and triumphant. No, Warfare’s action and violence are built on the contradictory fact that humans are both incredibly easy and very hard to kill. Injuries are graphic and horrible, and simultaneously, it is possible and often necessary to scramble out of the way of machine gun fire. Hitting a moving target that doesn’t want to be hit is no mean feat. Consequently, Warfare consistently commands audience attention and avoids burnout through the gaps between attacks and its relatively short 95-minute run-time. It isn’t an easy watch, and neither “thrilling” nor “fun” is the proper adjective. It’s compelling and well-crafted, especially its sound design. With so much of the action obscured or off-screen, sound becomes Warfare’s primary method for generating tension (the initial silence after an IED detonates) and emphasizing consequences (horrible, horrible screaming).

As a piece of pure film craft, Warfare is impressive, but nothing exists without context. This is a movie about the US invasion of Iraq, a military action that, putting it charitably, was an ethical, moral, strategic, and tactical disaster. Its narrow focus could easily make it a tribute to an act of valor, minus the greater context in which the mission occurred. The Iraqi families whose homes the unit occupies are portrayed sympathetically. Still, they aren’t the film’s focus, and their context (soldiers serving an occupying power break into their home, which puts them at direct risk of violent death when the soldiers are attacked) takes a backseat to the unit’s context (they’re trying to survive a violent attack by a determined foe who is willing to take significant personnel losses to kill them). 

Conversely, Warfare strips away the potential glamour of military service, and not in a “it’s grimy but noble or sexy” way. The members of the unit are brave, competent men. They’re also very, very young and spend the majority of Warfare scared out of their minds, trying to treat grievous, grody injuries while teetering on the edge of emotional and physical breakdowns and under fire, and achieve nothing beyond surviving and leaving two civilian families’ homes in ruins, never mind what tomorrow and all the tomorrows to follow will bring. As propaganda, this is not rah rah join the SEALs, as, say Wu Jing’s Wolf Warrior 2 is for the Chinese military. It’s subtler and thornier, for ill and good.

Then there’s the matter of memory. According to Warfare’s press kit, part of the reason the creative team chose to make a film out of this particular mission is that one of the central figures involved, Corpsman and sniper Elliott Miller (Jarvis), has no memory of the mission due to his injuries. Memory can manifest in a variety of ways, from last-loose-thread specific to the feeling that a particular sound, such as the boom of a jet buzzing the street as a show of force, invokes. Warfare uses a number of these techniques in the hopes of recreating 95 minutes in Ramadi. Warfare’s perspective is limited and specific. That it’s upfront about this is one of its most interesting features as a film. It’s intense, unnerving, and well made. Its propaganda is idiosyncratic and worth grappling with. It is, fittingly enough, memorable, mostly in a good way.