A combat epic that ‘does what film does best’

Alex Garland explored the slide into fractious factionalism in Civil War. Now he turns his gaze towards the ferocity of combat in new film Warfare, which stars Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis and Charles Melton.

Joseph Quinn’s excruciating howls of pain go on and on, and on and on in Warfare, continuing long after most films would have moved forward. The relentlessness of those cries, with his leg one bloody open wound, defines what is so unique and effective about this real-time 90-minute immersion into an actual US mission in Iraq.  

Alex Garland, the writer and director of Civil War, and Ray Mendoza, a veteran who was its military advisor, have co-directed a bold marvel of a film. Together, Garland’s virtuosity and Mendoza’s first-hand experience create a masterful technical achievement that is, more important, emotionally harrowing.

Warfare feels even more visceral because it arrives when actual wars are raging, from Israel and Gaza to Ukraine, giving the film more immediacy than it might have had even just five years ago.

Civil War extrapolated from today’s politically divided world into a near-future where combat tears across the US. The film’s marketing, somewhat disingenuously, claimed it was apolitical, but that was only true in the sense that this dire warning didn’t endorse specific political parties. Warfare is more truly apolitical, focusing on the nature of war itself by way of one that happens to be in Iraq.

Mendoza was part of the 2006 mission the film depicts, an operation that was not major or particularly notable, just a cog in the war machine. Minutes into the film, a group of US Navy Seals – played by first-rate actors including Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Charles Melton, Kit Connor and D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai – creep into an Iraqi town to do surveillance ahead of ground troops arriving the next day. They take over a house, dragging its residents out of bed and smashing through a wall between two apartments, and soon spot al-Qaeda jihadists gathering across the street. Tension builds, but nothing prepares us for the shattering sound or the bloody impact when a grenade is lobbed into their window.

Let’s not exaggerate that immersive element. Sitting in a cinema doesn’t come close to the reality of combat, but Warfare does what film does best, recreating the feelings of fear and simple will to live when you are trapped, a sitting target for armed men doing their best to kill you.   

Garland and Mendoza’s rigorous approach to the screenplay makes this film more docudrama than fiction. They relied entirely on the accounts of the men who were part of the mission, cross-checking to account for faulty memories. They invented no plot twists, and drop us into the action without any backstory about the characters. The dialogue is restricted to the military shorthand the Seals would have used, with no time for the jokey banter most war movies indulge in.

That sounds dry, but every actor makes it work, partly because they have faces that hold the screen. Woon-A-Tai (Reservation Dogs) is a central character, playing Mendoza himself, a communications officer relaying by radio the team’s locations and information back to home base. Woon-A-Tai captures the intensity of the job. If he fails, it all goes wrong. The film doesn’t explain its military jargon, but it’s easy enough to grasp that when he radios for a “casevac” it means a casualty evacuation for the wounded.

Poulter plays the officer in charge of the group, and has one of the few memorable lines. When help is nearby and he can’t pinpoint his exact location, he tells them: “Look for the blood and the smoke. We’re there.”

Quinn is a standout even before his character’s injuries, conveying a fear and sense of danger not far from the surface. But the effectiveness of the real-time approach is felt most strongly after he is wounded, and his inescapable cries continue in the background even as the others strategise how to move him and Jarvis’s severely wounded character out when US tanks arrive.

As Civil War demonstrated, Garland is an expert at creating intense action scenes. When the Seals attempt to leave, another grenade explodes on the street. Sound becomes muffled. The screen fills with smoke so that it feels like night. When the smoke clears, there are wounded men and a severed leg on the ground. In real-life news reports, the most graphic videos usually come with warnings that the images might be disturbing, but Garland and Mendoza don’t let us look away.

Warfare is in a line of films about divisive conflicts, from Vietnam (Apocalypse Now) to Iraq (The Hurt Locker), that have focused on the soldiers rather than the politics. But no war film is entirely detached from its setting, and Garland and Mendoza acknowledge that in a significant way.

The Iraqi civilians don’t get much time on screen, but the impact of those scenes is enormous. As a father, mother and their two small children cower together in the corner of a bedroom, the Americans’ reassurances that they won’t be hurt seem hollow. These people are civilians held at gunpoint as their home is destroyed around them simply because it is in a convenient location for surveillance. They are both specific to Iraq and stand-ins for innocent victims of wars everywhere.

Apolitical though Warfare is, with its blood-soaked scenes and brutal sounds, it seems to question the wisdom of settling any conflict, even or especially one about global power and politics, with the kind of violence this film draws us into so intimately.