Warfare

The novelist-turned-screenwriter-turned-director quickly clarified his remarks about stepping back "for the foreseeable future" last year, but doubts persisted that we would see anything new from the Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Civil War helmer anytime soon. Those fears were clearly misplaced, and the result is the most immersive, unsettling look at the Iraq War since The Hurt Locker. A title card announces that Warfare depicts actual events from November 2006 as recalled by the Navy SEALs involved and that “this film uses only their memories” to tell its story. One of those veterans is co-writer/director Ray Mendoza, whose involvement in the project is the source of its ultra-authenticity.

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In being so unsensational and putting so much emphasis on the small, lived-in details that most movies gloss over, Warfare becomes uniquely enthralling. This begins with the first extended sequence, during which the platoon holes up in a house while their sniper sets his aim on a few buildings several blocks away and the potential threats loitering in and around it: what they’re wearing, whether or not they appear to be looking the soldiers’ way. The segment is long, quiet, and, by the standards of conventional war films, a little boring. It’s also more realistic than any of its analogues. In the silence and drudgery is a mounting unease as we become increasingly aware that something is coming; the only question is whether it will arrive in seconds, minutes, or hours.

The soldiers are clearly bored as they try to stay alert, a feeling some audience members may share as they wait for the other shoe to drop. Drop it inevitably does in the form of an IED blast that manages to come out of nowhere despite how long we’ve been waiting for it, dividing the film — and several lives — into a violent before and after. Two of their number are severely wounded, and it quickly becomes clear that the entirety of Warfare will take place over this long, brutal day.

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Garland got his start in film as a screenwriter on projects like 28 Days Later and Never Let Me Go before making the jump to directing with Ex Machina, making it especially notable that he collaborated on his latest project. There’s a good reason for it: Warfare’s authenticity shines through in every frame, and it’s impossible to imagine it feeling that way without Mendoza’s involvement. More compelling than an instructional video and more accurate than most dramas, this is the kind of movie you can imagine new recruits being required to watch before deploying.

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It’s as though Garland and Mendoza made a list of every overused trope in the genre and made a conscious decision to eschew each and every one of them. One exception is that their movie pays as little attention to the innocent bystanders caught in the crossfire as possible. We never learn anything about the family whose house these soldiers have turned into a stronghold, nor are the Iraqis assisting them given anything to do but die in the initial explosion. There’s little thought given to what their perspective might be, only the implicit understanding that they’re tertiary characters in the drama despite actually living here — and having to rebuild their homes, to say nothing of their lives, after the Americans depart.

Warfare's authenticity shines through in every frame.

One could argue that most war movies don’t strive to this level of heightened realism for a reason. After the blast, as two soldiers lay incapacitated and the rest are covered in ash as they attempt to get them to safety, you’ll have trouble distinguishing one face from another and struggle to keep up with the technical jargon on the radio. The cast is a who’s who of up-and-comers that includes D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (Reservation Dogs), Cosmo Jarvis (Shōgun), Will Poulter (Midsommar), Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things), and Charles Melton (May December), all of whom turn into a faceless mass in their shared struggle, with the shellshocked commanding officer telling his counterpart on the other end of his comms device to “look for the blood and smoke” to find them.

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But while Warfare’s vibe is the opposite of crowdpleasing, the filmmakers’ commitment to getting every small detail right is commendable. This belongs firmly in the “good movies you won’t want to watch again” category, a stronger endorsement than it might sound like.