Alex Garland's Iraq-war film Warfare is visceral, exciting and unethical

CBC

11-04-2025

There are multiple MAMs on the roof. Your CO is screaming in your ear to collapse to the first deck, while JTAC is screaming for CASEVAC. Two bravos wait outside, surrounded by IED phosphorus. A frogman kneels beside you, while another frantically asks if you've broken down yet — equipment's good to go. Someone pops smoke. The show of force is three mikes out. The first frogman is smiling.
"BTF up, bro!"
Confused yet? Don't worry, I am, too. I was frantically scribbling notes throughout director Alex Garland's most recent apolitical politics movie Warfare, and I'm still not sure I got all the terms right. For all I know, I may have just sworn at you.
But explanation and context are not desirable qualities to Garland. In fact, at a recent Toronto Q&A, when somebody asks what value his film has for audiences, he basically says they're taboo.
"One of the functions of this film is to hear from a veteran as accurate as possible," he says of Warfare, which painstakingly recreates, in real time, a specific catastrophe ex-Navy SEAL and co-director Ray Mendoza went through in 2006 in Iraq.
"Taking away cinematic devices like music … in order to get something maybe more reliable."
WATCH | Warfare trailer:
An attempt to avoid manufactured emotion
It's an interesting — if entirely artificial — constraint he's laid at his own feet: everything that you see in Warfare really happened. But more than that, everything that happened, Garland would have you believe, is in Warfare.
"There was no decision to be made about whether something was valuable for the story or how helpful it would be for audiences," he said. "There's no backstory, because these guys don't talk about their backstory … There's nothing to explain their jargon — there's nothing to help anyone."
But as a result, what ends up making it to the screen is a slick, almost nauseating confusion.
The boundaries Garland draws for himself are probably most evident in how we connect — or rather, fail to connect — with the characters. Though we are sold on famous faces — Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn and Canada's D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai round out the impressive cast list — we are hardly able to hold on to their names, let alone learn what makes them keep fighting as faceless Iraqi forces pepper them with small-arms fire.
So why did Garland make a movie devoid of character growth, political examination or commentary? To explain, he tells a story about the time he was backpacking through Vietnam and stumbled across an establishment called The Apocalypse Now Bar, named after the 1979 Francis Ford Coppola movie.
Given the film's stunningly bleak depiction of war in Vietnam, Garland saw the contrast as ironic. Using poetry, music, set design — and yes, story — Coppola was able to construct a movie with a message that reaches across decades. One that holds so much cultural cachet that a bar owner in Vietnam was willing to ignore the blood-soaked title, and use its allure to attract starry-eyed Western backpackers.
Garland and Mendoza view making a movie with that level of manufactured emotion as a mistake, and it wasn't something they wanted to repeat.
Anti-war movies
"There are anti-war films that exist," Garland said at the Q&A. "But something that is really unfiltered, and is trying to be as honest as it possibly can, seems to me to have value."
The goal is admirable. François Truffaut is often quoted as saying, "It is impossible to make an anti-war film." That's because the limited scope and implicit artistic bias of cinema necessarily leads to a glorification of war instead of an indictment of it.
No matter how harrowing the Saving Private Ryan Omaha Beach invasion scene is, or how macabre and eye-opening the infamous Soviet coming-of-age war movie Come and See may be, they are truncated simulations you live through from the comfort and safety of a theatre seat.
So why not go the Garland route and do your level best to remove yourself as a factor? It's a strategy the director recently employed in Civil War, the summer blockbuster marketed as a timely commentary on the violently fractious state of U.S. politics. In the end, it was so politically spineless it unironically chose to depict California and Texas teaming up against the rest of the country.
While that could have been seen as an unfortunate marketing hiccup, Warfare cements Garland's "shut up and dribble" beliefs when it comes to the arts — a philosophy that artists shouldn't challenge the biases of their audiences, as that somehow goes beyond the job description.
Harrowing and believable performances
This is not to detract from Warfare 's achievements as a re-enactment. It is constantly efficient and exciting, expertly choreographed with harrowing and believable performances.
Warfare is the type of movie for American Sniper fans — specifically, the ones who felt annoyed whenever director Clint Eastwood turned away from the pink mist to question the role self-deluded nationalism plays in the primacy of American foreign policy.
But in Garland's misguided belief that objectivity is even possible, Warfare contradicts the message it's actually sending, while pretending it's making no statement at all.
Every jet swooping in to push back the unnamed, unexamined attackers, every adrenaline-pumping AR bullet pumped into exploding concrete, and every hand-holding moment of masculine camaraderie (including the almost sickeningly apt tagline: "The only way out is together") works to cement a worldview that Garland apparently believes is fact, not opinion.
A worldview that suggests American military might is right, and — aside from a few unfortunate hiccups — the current global power structure is hunky dory. The good guy is on top.
This is not a rare belief — far from it. Everything from Black Hawk Down to the incredible series Band of Brothers operates under this axiom. But they also do so from the obvious understanding that all art is, should be, and must be, subjective. All art is political, and as even documentarians will tell you, every filmmaker is showing you a limited, slanted version of the truth.
Intentionally blinding yourself to that fact, telling yourself and your audience that you are being objective is, in a word, unethical. Instead, Warfare glorifies its depiction of war by hiding behind the gimmick of simply showing the truth.
This is really what happened, Warfare claims, as it shows you flag-bearing Americans valiantly fighting against inexplicably bloodthirsty "MAMs" — a military term used to refer to "military aged males." And every drop of blood they really shed reinforces a narrative Garland is somehow unaware could have another side.
You don't even need to dig too far beneath the surface to unearth the belief supporting that misstep. In fact, it's one that Garland himself admits to.
"I started doing this at 24 and I'm now in my mid-50s," he said, "And realizing that truth has an electricity about it that is just different — and leaning into that electricity."
But in Warfare, that electricity doesn't come from truth. It comes from an unending maelstrom of bullets, buttressing a film absolved of questioning how we should feel about them.
You might call the end result nothing more than video game voyeurism, but that also falls short. Even Call of Duty managed its infamous "No Russian" level, which asked players to participate in a mass shooting at an airport — both emotionally binding them to the main character and making them question the morality of brutal warfare.
In Warfare, the closest we come to that is a five-second sequence where a woman whose home is destroyed in the crossfire grabs Poulter.
"Why?!" she screams. "Why, why, why?"
Poulter's character gives the only answer Warfare ever offers up.
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry," he says. And then the bullets are back.