The legendary Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami once wryly remarked that he prefers “the films that put their audience to sleep in the theater.” Frequently taken out of context, Kiarostami’s statement was part of a larger rant against what he saw as a certain scourge in Western filmmaking, that of the blockbuster which takes its audience “hostage,” overwhelming with bombastic aestheticism that nails you to your seat but leaves you feeling empty.
Kiarostami might’ve had a word or two to say about Alex Garland, whose latest vision of American dystopia is uncharacteristically situated in our real-life and immediate past. Warfare is set during one day in November of 2006, when a Navy SEALs outfit was suddenly faced with an evacuation straight out of hell’s gate. Though the film is meticulously based on first-hand accounts from survivors of the mission, it is incuriously unspecific, as generic and as politically inscrutable as its title is nebulous. While it aims for an unromantic portrait of combat, it can only conceive of doing so through haptic recreation in lieu of actual characterization. The result is a cacophonous temper tantrum, a vacuous and perfidious advertisement for military recruitment.
At best, Warfare is an artfully made recreation; at worst it is naked military propaganda set during one of the country’s most egregious moments of imperialism. Several moments of the film are appreciably harrowing – but on the whole the film is mired in the same war fetishization that it aims to denounce. There is something extremely odd about a film which purports to deliver on a promise of unfiltered combat but yet refuses to contextualize either the mission itself or the war in which it is set. No attempt is made to explain why these SEALs are on a surveillance mission of an Al Qaeda holdout, nor is there any real moral reckoning with the Iraq War. One wonders why Garland and co-director Ray Mendoza have made the film at all when there seems to be not simply an ignorance of the period in question but an active distaste for realizing its real-life consequences.
Even summarizing Warfare’s plot feels like a pyrrhic exercise, so thin is its premise and so anonymous are its characterizations (something that the filmmakers themselves couldn’t have been totally unaware of, as the credits pair the actors with their real-life equivalents, most of whom have apparently chosen to have their face blurred in an accidental nod to the preceding, mind-numbing ninety minutes). Warfare plots, in real time, a surveillance mission in Ramadi gone awry when nearby Al Qaeda insurgents detonate a series of IEDs outside a housing building which the team has taken over. With everywhere seeming like an almost certain deathtrap, the surviving members must figure out how to get out to safety.
In his attempt to portray the brutal “realities” of war, Garland has only glorified it; close-ups of shattered flesh and bone and prolonged periods of men screaming in pain only reify the film’s vision of service people as inherently good. Though the team has brutally co-opted a residential building as a makeshift and temporary base, efforts are shown to “protect” the innocent family and children caught in the fray. There is, in short, nothing here but unadulterated hagiography of American military might, which feels especially egregious considering the war in question and the filmmaker’s own apparent intentions. But this isn’t Saving Private Ryan, either. Garland and Mendoza present their heroes as one might understand Call of Duty characters: they are exceptional because of how closely they seem to adhere to protocol, yet completely lacking in anything resembling a human being. It is 90 minutes of military codes and noble deeds in the fog of war. One could squint to find an embedded message about how war harms both the youth it employs and the innocent bystanders of the place it targets (or how those innocent bystanders are more often than not left to clean up the mess made by the soldiers), but this more tantalizing thread is but a squeak drowned out by an earthquake.
As an exercise in tactile filmmaking, Warfare is frequently a success. The sounds of gunfire and soaring fighter jets reverberate through the entire body with a prowess not really seen since Top Gun: Maverick. But it is limited to its mechanical processes, and, if the entire film is based solely on its ability to knock you back into your seat, it is merely a blustery, futile gesture – the cinematic equivalent of a military show of force. For some that may prove to be incentive enough, but ultimately Warfare is a lot of sound and fury signifying nothing, nothing at all.
Title: Warfare
Distributor: A24
Release date: April 11, 2025
Directors–screenwriters: Ray Mendoza, Alex Garland
Cast: D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn, Kit Connor, Finn Bennett, Taylor John Smith, Michael Gandolfini, Adain Bradley, Noah Centineo, Evan Holtzman, Henry Zaga, Charles Melton, Alex Brockdorff
Rating: R
Running time: 1 hr 35 min
