Warfare: the most harrowing – and honest – depiction of modern combat ever made

Telegraph

28-03-2025

It's not the sort of performance that typically hoovers up awards, but Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza's Warfare begins with one of the finest bits of acting you'll see this year. A squad of young male Navy SEALs are gathered round a television, which is showing the aerobics-themed video music for Eric Prydz's Call On Me. (If Garland had been feeling more capricious, he might have called the film Lads on Tour.)
We are, without question, in the very middest of the mid-Noughties: legs splay, backs arch and bottoms thrust to a whumping dance beat, all in smoggy 640x480p. Most of the guys cheer and joke, but at the back a SEAL played by Will Poulter simply smiles calmly to himself.
It's a smile not of pleasure but acceptance. Barely out of his 20s, he senses death already closing in, and is glad of the passing comfort pretty girls (or boys) in skimpy lycra can provide. That's what much of art is – sparkly distractions from the inevitable – and many films are made with no greater aim in mind. Warfare, it soon becomes clear, will not be one of them.
In a sense this is Garland's simplest film; in another, it's his most experimental. Working (and sharing top-line credits) with the military advisor and ex-Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, the two men have reconstructed an incident from Mendoza's years in active service: the seizure, siege and evacuation of an apartment block in the Iraqi city of Ramadi in 2006. The result feels like the most honest depiction of modern warfare I can recall seeing on screen. Aside from a brief contextualising prologue, the whole event plays out on screen in real time, at least as its participants remember it. 'This film uses only their memories,' reads the charged open caption – which is pointedly distinct from 'based on a true story'.
The experimental aspects are twofold. First: if, per Hitchcock, drama is life with the dull bits cut out, then Warfare is war with the dull bits left in. For much of the opening act, insofar as it even qualifies as an act, Poulter and his squad are just waiting for something to happen, sitting around, taking notes and surveilling suspicious adult males who may or may not be 'getting their jihad on'. This grim limbo, we're given to understand, is warfare too.
Second – flowing from the above – is the film's unfashionable refusal to offer any built-in 'takes' on the soldiers or their actions. Warfare is a very different film in many respects to Jonathan Glazer's towering fly-on-the-concentration-camp wall drama The Zone of Interest, but it also makes a point of outsourcing all moral judgement to its audience. This will inevitably mean accusations of being pro-war, or Blairite, and so on – though anyone who can watch and listen to the attack that ensues and think 'what a marvellous advert for war, and the Iraq War specifically' has the IQ of a cheese and onion crisp.
That attack, when it comes, turns the film into a living Goya canvas: senses swim, the air thickens with panic, bodies are punctured, torn and ground into meat. The production and sound design are astonishing – as viscerally immersive as the script is coolly detached. Indeed, the subsequent action, in a good way, leaves you feeling constantly betrayed. The die-to-hire-'em cast of marketable heartthrobs are filmed like they're nobodies – philosophical rigour on Garland's part, but surely also pure mischief – while the genre's hallmark consolations (the lucky shot, the ironic twist of fate, and so on) just keep refusing to show up.
It's necessarily less sweeping than Garland's recent Civil War, and for all its fire and fury plays as something of a philosophical B-side to that bigger earlier film. I'd certainly be uncomfortable calling it an action movie, even though vast tracts of it are nothing but. It leaves questions ringing in your ears as well as gunfire – and the 'what now?' posed by its destabilising final scene is every bit as chilling as Civil War's own ambivalent parting image: a victory-is-ours trophy shot with queasy overtones of Abu Ghraib. Part of the genius of Warfare's ending is that it admits that war rarely – if ever – contains endings at all.