Warfare
“Warfare” feels like a companion piece to Alex Garland’s “Civil War” in how he’s acting as a documentarian of historical events. Rather than telling a fictional story, however, he collaborates with Ray Mendoza- a former Navy Seal- as they take us into the heart of combat in Ramadi, Iraq in 2006. Taken from the memories of Mendoza and his fellow soldiers, “Warfare” is most directly inspired by “Saving Private Ryan” and “Black Hawk Down” in how it thrusts us into a seemingly unwinnable situation. I was fully engaged in how Garland and Mendoza told this story, but I understand if it just doesn’t have the same pop for other people.
Probably the most startling scene in the entire film is the first one, as we see the platoon of Navy Seals we will be following during the next 90+ minutes watching TV, and getting irrationally excited. When one has been on tour as long as these soldiers appear to have been, just about anything is bound to get you going. We next see them traveling the streets of Ramadi, and splitting off into two buildings for surveillance; they have an eye in the sky to help them, but their own eyes will help assess the situation on the ground. The next day, Alpha One- led by Will Poulter’s Erik- starts to see movement along the way. Then, an attack begins.
Similar to “Civil War,” Garland has a fairly stripped-down narrative he’s telling in this film. Due to some of the real-life people not wanting to be identified, we do not get to know these characters outside of this moment- which unfolds in a real-time manner- and honestly, I think both aspects work better here than they did in “Civil War,” though I do still want to give that one another watch. This film gets to the tension and stasis of being in a war zone, and how- when one shifts into the other- it is jarring. This is a film not intended to be a complex narrative, but a sensory experience putting us inside the horrors of combat, and Garland and Mendoza accomplish that. Our screening was in IMAX, and the way that the sound design and David J. Thompson’s cinematography popped off of the screen was an all-encompassing use of the format, and the way the directors and editor Fin Oates make their editorial choices of how to cut the sequences make them all the more harrowing to watch.
It’s been said by many that all war films are inherently anti-war films. I don’t know if that’s true of a lot of American-made WWII films in the decades after that war, but I think a case can be made for every film about the Iraq War that began in 2003 being one. While I had issues with Garland’s lack of political directness in how he built the world of “Civil War,” here, the lack of politics is a plus in the film’s case. It allows us to see these soldiers in the situation they are currently in, and empathize with how they have been put into the crossfire, while they still set out and do their job. “Warfare” is a haunting, superbly-made testament to how they put themselves in harm’s way, even if we see- from the outside- that they’ve been asked to do so for needless reasons. That might be the ultimate goal of “Warfare,” and it is a noble one.
