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Yahoo
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Warfare cast share meaningful reason behind matching tattoos
Making Warfare was a truly bonding experience for the cast, who crafted a genuine brotherhood whilst portraying a group of real life Navy SEALs who found themselves stuck in a hideout in Ramadi, Iraq, when pinned down by enemy combatant in 2006. The movie, directed by Alex Garland and war veteran Ray Mendoza, has an ensemble cast representing Mendoza and the men he served with and it recounts in real-time their fight for survival. Telling this story as truthfully as possible required an extensive amount of preparation and dedication from the cast, which led them to become a real team. And after shooting finished the team were so close they decided to all get matching tattoos, which say "Call on Me" as a reference to the song that starts the movie, and so much more. For actors Michael Gandolfini, D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Kit Connor, and Cosmo Jarvis it was a meaningful thing for them to do, and an important way to prove they have each other's back. When asked about it, Gandolfini explains that making the film together taught the cast "what it meant to be a young man, how to look out for each other, [and] honesty" as he adds: "I believe that all of us walked away with principles that changed us forever as young men, and [we] learned what kind of older men we would like to be. "There was a collective responsibility in protecting one another and the tattoos that we got it's three words, Call on Me, which was a direct connection to the opening of the film and the SEALs, but also a result that anywhere we go, anytime we have a hard time, we can call one another. We can call one of our castmates and they'll always be there for us. "There was a different feeling after this movie when you walk out into the world and something bad happens and you have 12, 13 guys that are there for you, it's different." Woon-A-Tai felt particularly moved by this idea, adding: "In a lot of other sets it kind of feels, if I may, like in a sense summer camp where you know you're never probably going to see these guys ever again, or see these people again, and the love we built that was so, so real and so strong. "I felt like personally leaving with a tattoo kind of forever —because it's going be on my body forever— I will prove to these guys that this is not just a summer camp and this is not just words, that I'm leaving a mark on my body forever. And that's the love I have for these guys, that's gonna be there forever." It was the training that they went through before filming began that helped forge this bond, Connor reveals: "We did a three 3 1/2 week bootcamp at the beginning, instructed by Ray, where we learned a lot in terms of the technical stuff that we would need to be able to do the project, but then I think one of the results of that was we had an incredible bond formed so that, by the time we started shooting, we already had this really strong relationship with one another. "It kind of meant that a lot of the emotional and psychological work that one might need to do as an actor for a role like this wasn't quite so necessary, because we already had this emotional understanding with one another." Woon-A-Tai remarks that they gave "a lot of blood, sweat and tears" to the project, and the pressure they felt to do justice to Mendoza and his fellow soldiers meant that the cast "were there for each other in a way that I've never experienced with other castmates," as he went on: "Our boot camp was very much what set us up to be the brothers that we are today, and that's because of Ray Mendoza." The co-director's intention with Warfare was for it to be a personal letter to his fellow SEAL Elliot, who was seriously wounded during the raid and doesn't remember what happened that day. This gave actor Cosmo Jarvis an interesting responsibility as his onscreen counterpart. "Elliott can't remember what happened to him and so I couldn't necessarily mine Elliott's mind for information about it, but I did have many of his and Ray's other colleagues to talk to and to help with research. We all did," the Shogun star explains. "And their presence, the presence of all the SEALs and the fact that they were enthusiastic about this initiative and that they wanted to help us and we wanted to help them, was this very unusual, really quite excellent reciprocal arrangement. They would help us, we would help them, and it created a very enthusiastic work environment." Gandolfini reiterated the importance of having their real life counterparts involved in the making of the movie, sharing: "Ray and Alex and all of these men that were a part of helping tell the story for Elliott [created] a completely different thing about this whole experience, our job [was] an actual application of service that was we can show Elliott what happened to him and he can learn. There's a direct positive result." Woon-A-Tai, too, felt a responsibility while playing Mendoza in front of the man himself, though he adds that it was also an honour to do so: "First and foremost, it was an amazing opportunity. I was grateful to represent a story so personal, probably one of the most traumatic experiences of his life and for him to trust this Canadian kid who has never been in the military ever, to trust me with his personal story, it is an understatement to say that I'm grateful. "Of course there was pressure on my shoulders, we all had pressure on our shoulders, but of course the guy was sat right behind the camera. But in all honesty, I don't want to say any of this because there was more pressure on his shoulders than there was mine. "I'm just an actor, he's telling a personal story, a traumatic history. He's also representing on behalf of a whole community that, in all honesty, gets misrepresented through film [all the time]. And so he had way more pressure on his shoulders than I could have ever had." It was "essential" for the cast to have Mendoza's input in the movie, Jarvis adds, and it helped to make them feel closer to the story: "It's an amazing thing to be able to be directed by somebody who is directing you with the sole purpose of truthfully recreating something that he lived through, it just never happens. "He's an amazing director and the way he communicates as a leader and the way he inspires his workforce his is unlike anything I've ever witnessed." "He's an incredible teacher, an incredible man in a lot of ways and he knew exactly what to do," Connor adds. "He knew exactly how much to give us to go on, how much prep to to give us, he was playing the long game with us. The whole bootcamp was really a way of bonding us, it was a way of teaching us the skills, [but] it was a way of best preparing us for the for the job at hand." Jarvis calls making Warfare a "profound experience" because of all the things he and his castmates learned in the process. "It was a very unusual and unique experience," he remarks. "Just in general it was a unique and unusual experience, but in terms of acting it was also a very unique experience. It was a job during which the compelling reasons to want to do our best work extended beyond the normal individualistic reasons. "They were reasons that we all shared because of the people involved in this, and the reason for this existing in the first place, which was to help somebody recreate an event that happened to them so that they could communicate what that experience was. It all just felt like it was a profound experience." Warfare premieres in UK cinemas on Friday, 18 April.
Yahoo
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Movie Review: 'Warfare,' a forensic portrait of combat, hunts war-movie clichés
Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland 's 'Warfare' is more defined by what it isn't than what it is. In their Iraq War -set film, there's never any description of a wider strategy. There are no backstories to the American Navy SEALs whom we follow on an unspectacular mission. There's not a short monologue about mom's cooking back home, let alone a speculative word about life after the war. There's not even a dramatic close-up to be had. 'Warfare' aspires to be, simply, just that. We are effectively embedded in a platoon on what seems to be a minor mission in Iraq in 2006. Walking in two single-file lines down a Ramadi street at night, one soldier says, 'I like this house.' Under the cover of darkness, they rush inside the apartment building to set up their position while keeping the family inside quiet. In the morning, their sniper, laid out on a raised bed, sweats while looking out on an increasingly anxious scene. His rifle's crosshairs drift through the street scenes outside, as suspected jihadists mobilize around them. War-movie cliches have been rigorously rooted out of 'Warfare,' a terse and chillingly brutal immersion in a moment of the Iraq War. Clouds of IED smoke and cries of agony fill Garland and Mendoza's film, with little but the faces of the SEALs to ground a nearly real-time, based-on-a-true-story dramatization. Few words are spoken outside the intense patter of official Navy jargon. When the mission comes to its bloody and hectic conclusion, the only utterance left hanging in the clouded air is the unanswered, blood-curdling shriek of a woman watching the men leave her bombed-out home: 'Why?' A year after 'Civil War,' a movie predicated on bringing the horror of war home to American soil, Garland has returned with a film even more designed to implode fanciful and far-away ideas of war by bringing it acutely close. Mendoza, an Iraq War veteran who served as a consultant on 'Civil War,' co-writes and co-directs 'Warfare' from his own first-hand experience in Iraq. The movie is introduced as based on the memories of the troops involved, and 'Warfare' gives little reason to quibble with its ultra verisimilitude. That doesn't mean Mendoza and Garland's film isn't without its sympathies. For a movie quaking with sonic tremors, the first thumps sounded in 'Warfare' come from the 2004 music video to Eric Prydz's 'Call on Me,' as the battalion bops in harmony to the female bodies gyrating on a screen in front of them. In battle, they are hardly any less choreographed. If a mode of American war movie leans toward showing the follies of war on the ground, the soldiers of 'Warfare' — while not immune to a little 'Call on Me' imitation — are supremely precise. When things go haywire here, it's not because the SEALs aren't alert or are haphazard in their regard for the lives around them. Among them are sniper Elliott (Cosmo Jarvis), Eric (Will Poulter), Tommy (Kit Connor), Sam (Joseph Quinn) and Ray (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai). We never learn anything about any of them except their fidelity to their comrades and their willingness to do what's necessary when even the heaviest fire is raining down on them. Sounds of fire pop through the immersive sound design of Glenn Freemantle. Whether 'Warfare' is the most accurate war film ever made or not, it's certainly among the most sonically enveloping experiences of battle. After an explosion rocks the men, 'Warfare' staggers in a concussed haze. The film's craft, generally, is impressive, including production designer Mark Digby's recreation of the Ramadi block. Despite all the effort to shed 'Warfare' of war-movie tropes, though, they do intrude in one glaring way. Like countless movies before it, 'Warfare' runs its credits alongside photographs of the real SEALs (some faces are blurred out), along with footage of them with the actors and filmmakers on set. To honor the real men is, of course, laudable and necessary. But the behind-the-scenes tone of the epilogue chafes with the spell cast by 'Warfare.' The point of 'Warfare,' to me, seems less about paying these Navy SEALs tribute than showing combat how it truly unspools — messily, chaotically and pointlessly. With the exception of a pair of Iraqi interpreters, 'Warfare' — despite its broad title — limits itself to one side of a battle. But I'd argue the only bad guy in 'Warfare' isn't on either side of the fight, but is found in the aerial viewpoint — used sporadically by the filmmakers — from a U.S. plane overhead that renders every person mere pixels on a screen. In this forensic portrait of war, the only way to not get what's happening on the ground is to be too far from it. François Truffaut famously said there's no such thing as an anti-war film because movies inherently glamorize war. 'Warfare,' though, is intent on challenging that old adage. 'Warfare,' an A24 release is rated R by the Motion Picture Association for intense war violence and bloody/grisly images, and language throughout. Running time: 107 minutes. Three stars out of four.
CNN
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
‘Warfare' wants to be the most authentic Iraq War film yet. Can Young Hollywood and an ex-Navy SEAL accomplish the mission?
'Warfare,' the new film co-directed by Alex Garland ('Civil War,' 'Ex Machina') and former US Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, knows it's going to give audiences a rough ride, so it starts off with a laugh. The nostalgic throbs of Eric Prydz's 2004 hit 'Call on Me' rise through the theater before it's infamous video – a crotch-thrusting pastiche of John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis's antics in 1985's 'Perfect' – appears on screen. (In IMAX, it's quite something.) We're seeing what a SEAL team is watching on a laptop screen at a military barracks near Baghdad. Suffice to say, they're into it. These men, barely out of childhood, could be spring breakers if not for the fatigues and rifles. They go wild when the bass drops. The next time we hear a boom, it won't be such fun. Culled from the memories of Mendoza and his former unit, 'Warfare' is a taught retelling of a mission gone sideways during the Iraq War in 2006. Mendoza's team was engaged in a surveillance mission in Ramadi when the house they were occupying came under attack, throwing the team into a fight for survival without the usual backup. The movie stars a Young Hollywood who's who of internet boyfriends (Charles Melton, Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, Kit Connor, Noah Centineo and more) including 'Reservation Dogs'' D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai as Mendoza. But the film has no time for matinee idols or Hollywood heroism, casting them as highly competent cogs in a machine that prizes teamwork over individual valor. Garland and Mendoza, who met when the latter consulted on 2024's 'Civil War,' thrashed out a framework for the script, before interviewing members of the unit to flesh out the details. 'It's an exercise in trying to recreate a real sequence of events as accurately as possible,' Garland told CNN. 'Were there discrepancies and conflicts in peoples' memories? Absolutely,' he recalled. 'Very often there were partial memories … then it became a sort of forensic reconstruction: If this thing is true and this thing is true, then that must also be true.' 'We needed a very simple rule,' he added, 'that the film would just include what happened.' The result is a movie with a laser-focused viewpoint and little to no exposition. There's also plenty of military jargon, both befuddling and comical ('Is he peeking or probing?' one soldier earnestly asks about a combatant). Mendoza positions the movie as a corrective to so much of what he and other veterans have seen before. 'Traditionally, the people who are making movies about war haven't experienced it,' he said. (John Ford, John Huston, Oliver Stone and others might disagree, but in recent years the statement is broadly true.) Previous filmmaking about the Iraq War 'oftentimes doesn't connect with me, doesn't connect with most veterans,' Mendoza added. 'They may shoot something that's really cool … but for the most part, (veterans are) like, 'yeah, they got that wrong,' or 'that's not how we talk,' or 'that's not how the culture is,' or 'we're being misrepresented in how we handle stress.'' Seeking to remedy this, the former SEAL put his cast through a three-week bootcamp ahead of production in the UK last year. The actors received weapons training, lessons in radio comms, tactical maneuvering and military first aid. 'Ray is a hell of a teacher,' said Cosmo Jarvis, who plays Elliot Miller, to whom the film is dedicated. 'The bootcamp did two things for us,' said Poulter, 'it gave us a condensed technical skill set in order to play a Navy SEAL and it also bonded us all in an amazing way. So the emotional side of things naturally took care of itself.' 'We probably spent eight weeks with each other,' recalled Melton. 'It was 6am to 6pm every day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. We didn't spend any time in the trailers, we were really just this family.' Despite its trim 95-minute runtime, the movie takes its time to get going. That's notable, argued Quinn. 'Especially with Hollywood portrayals of war, or things of that nature, I think that there's a melody or rhythm that filmmaking can fall into where nothing boring happens,' said the actor. In reality, 'there's so much downtime, and these men have to fill that downtime. The contrast between being idle and bored, and then being in a very perilous, dangerous situation, is quite interesting.' Unlike previous war movies that have dealt in the exceptional (think 'Saving Private Ryan' and its mission to extract Matt Damon's Ryan; 'Black Hawk Down' and its headline-making raid gone bad; 'The Hurt Locker' and its skilled and tormented bomb disposal expert) there's a grim sense that what happened to the SEAL team in 'Warfare' was commonplace. The violence, when it arrives, is brief, but its repercussions are explored in graphic and intimate detail. 'The intimacy was shared,' said Quinn, whose character Sam is at the sharp end of things. 'We were all there in the room … We weren't alone in what we were doing. And that was a kind of beautiful thing to come out of a very violent context – quite dark, I suppose.' For Mendoza, the reconstruction was an opportunity to process the trauma of events two decades ago. 'It's a never-ending process,' he said. 'Just because the war is over, it doesn't mean that it's over for us – in the sense of living with these things, or learning how to understand them, and learning how to convey them to people that you love.' 'Once I got out of the military, a lot of these mechanisms that I used to function (in the Navy) didn't necessarily serve me well when I got out. So there's a lot of work to do on one's self. Finding a new career in this industry – storytelling – I felt was therapeutic.' Mendoza has said he wanted to remind people that America's wars are fought by its youth. It's a point exemplified by fresh-faced 'Heartstopper' alum Kit Connor. 'I've just turned 21. I was 20 at the time of making it,' Connor said. 'I look younger than most of the soldiers that you would see on the big screen.' Garland bristles at the idea the movie contains a message. When asked what the film wanted to communicate to audiences about the Iraqi people it features, the director shot back. 'The film does not have the agenda you're implying it does,' he replied. 'It is not attempting to telegraph a message. It's attempting to telegraph information, and it's telegraphing the information in as honest a way as it can.' 'Warfare' ends with a coda that I won't spoil here, but it offers a moment of grace the film is crying out for after the action preceding it. It leaves an impression – though not as indelible as the one shared by the cast. In a nod to their new brothers in arms status and Prydz's lyric, many of the actors got matching tattoos reading 'call on me.' '(It) was something that was more of a symbolic expression that represented our bond,' said Melton. 'Wherever we are in the world, our thing is you can call on me.' 'Mine is on my left thigh,' he added. 'Mine's on my left thigh, too,' said Woon-A-Tai. Poulter, late to the party, said he would get his done within the next 24 hours. 'I can guarantee it to you guys,' he said to them both, with more sincerity than anything Eric Prydz-related deserves. A day later, Poulter revealed he'd joined their ranks. Brothers in arms, legs; not the same boys that they used to be. 'Warfare' is released in cinemas in the US and UK on April 11. Rochelle Beighton conducted interviews for this article.
CNN
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
‘Warfare' wants to be the most authentic Iraq War film yet. Can Young Hollywood and an ex-Navy SEAL accomplish the mission?
'Warfare,' the new film co-directed by Alex Garland ('Civil War,' 'Ex Machina') and former US Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, knows it's going to give audiences a rough ride, so it starts off with a laugh. The nostalgic throbs of Eric Prydz's 2004 hit 'Call on Me' rise through the theater before it's infamous video – a crotch-thrusting pastiche of John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis's antics in 1985's 'Perfect' – appears on screen. (In IMAX, it's quite something.) We're seeing what a SEAL team is watching on a laptop screen at a military barracks near Baghdad. Suffice to say, they're into it. These men, barely out of childhood, could be spring breakers if not for the fatigues and rifles. They go wild when the bass drops. The next time we hear a boom, it won't be such fun. Culled from the memories of Mendoza and his former unit, 'Warfare' is a taught retelling of a mission gone sideways during the Iraq War in 2006. Mendoza's team was engaged in a surveillance mission in Ramadi when the house they were occupying came under attack, throwing the team into a fight for survival without the usual backup. The movie stars a Young Hollywood who's who of internet boyfriends (Charles Melton, Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, Kit Connor, Noah Centineo and more) including 'Reservation Dogs'' D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai as Mendoza. But the film has no time for matinee idols or Hollywood heroism, casting them as highly competent cogs in a machine that prizes teamwork over individual valor. Garland and Mendoza, who met when the latter consulted on 2024's 'Civil War,' thrashed out a framework for the script, before interviewing members of the unit to flesh out the details. 'It's an exercise in trying to recreate a real sequence of events as accurately as possible,' Garland told CNN. 'Were there discrepancies and conflicts in peoples' memories? Absolutely,' he recalled. 'Very often there were partial memories … then it became a sort of forensic reconstruction: If this thing is true and this thing is true, then that must also be true.' 'We needed a very simple rule,' he added, 'that the film would just include what happened.' The result is a movie with a laser-focused viewpoint and little to no exposition. There's also plenty of military jargon, both befuddling and comical ('Is he peeking or probing?' one soldier earnestly asks about a combatant). Mendoza positions the movie as a corrective to so much of what he and other veterans have seen before. 'Traditionally, the people who are making movies about war haven't experienced it,' he said. (John Ford, John Huston, Oliver Stone and others might disagree, but in recent years the statement is broadly true.) Previous filmmaking about the Iraq War 'oftentimes doesn't connect with me, doesn't connect with most veterans,' Mendoza added. 'They may shoot something that's really cool … but for the most part, (veterans are) like, 'yeah, they got that wrong,' or 'that's not how we talk,' or 'that's not how the culture is,' or 'we're being misrepresented in how we handle stress.'' Seeking to remedy this, the former SEAL put his cast through a three-week bootcamp ahead of production in the UK last year. The actors received weapons training, lessons in radio comms, tactical maneuvering and military first aid. 'Ray is a hell of a teacher,' said Cosmo Jarvis, who plays Elliot Miller, to whom the film is dedicated. 'The bootcamp did two things for us,' said Poulter, 'it gave us a condensed technical skill set in order to play a Navy SEAL and it also bonded us all in an amazing way. So the emotional side of things naturally took care of itself.' 'We probably spent eight weeks with each other,' recalled Melton. 'It was 6am to 6pm every day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. We didn't spend any time in the trailers, we were really just this family.' Despite its trim 95-minute runtime, the movie takes its time to get going. That's notable, argued Quinn. 'Especially with Hollywood portrayals of war, or things of that nature, I think that there's a melody or rhythm that filmmaking can fall into where nothing boring happens,' said the actor. In reality, 'there's so much downtime, and these men have to fill that downtime. The contrast between being idle and bored, and then being in a very perilous, dangerous situation, is quite interesting.' Unlike previous war movies that have dealt in the exceptional (think 'Saving Private Ryan' and its mission to extract Matt Damon's Ryan; 'Black Hawk Down' and its headline-making raid gone bad; 'The Hurt Locker' and its skilled and tormented bomb disposal expert) there's a grim sense that what happened to the SEAL team in 'Warfare' was commonplace. The violence, when it arrives, is brief, but its repercussions are explored in graphic and intimate detail. 'The intimacy was shared,' said Quinn, whose character Sam is at the sharp end of things. 'We were all there in the room … We weren't alone in what we were doing. And that was a kind of beautiful thing to come out of a very violent context – quite dark, I suppose.' For Mendoza, the reconstruction was an opportunity to process the trauma of events two decades ago. 'It's a never-ending process,' he said. 'Just because the war is over, it doesn't mean that it's over for us – in the sense of living with these things, or learning how to understand them, and learning how to convey them to people that you love.' 'Once I got out of the military, a lot of these mechanisms that I used to function (in the Navy) didn't necessarily serve me well when I got out. So there's a lot of work to do on one's self. Finding a new career in this industry – storytelling – I felt was therapeutic.' Mendoza has said he wanted to remind people that America's wars are fought by its youth. It's a point exemplified by fresh-faced 'Heartstopper' alum Kit Connor. 'I've just turned 21. I was 20 at the time of making it,' Connor said. 'I look younger than most of the soldiers that you would see on the big screen.' Garland bristles at the idea the movie contains a message. When asked what the film wanted to communicate to audiences about the Iraqi people it features, the director shot back. 'The film does not have the agenda you're implying it does,' he replied. 'It is not attempting to telegraph a message. It's attempting to telegraph information, and it's telegraphing the information in as honest a way as it can.' 'Warfare' ends with a coda that I won't spoil here, but it offers a moment of grace the film is crying out for after the action preceding it. It leaves an impression – though not as indelible as the one shared by the cast. In a nod to their new brothers in arms status and Prydz's lyric, many of the actors got matching tattoos reading 'call on me.' '(It) was something that was more of a symbolic expression that represented our bond,' said Melton. 'Wherever we are in the world, our thing is you can call on me.' 'Mine is on my left thigh,' he added. 'Mine's on my left thigh, too,' said Woon-A-Tai. Poulter, late to the party, said he would get his done within the next 24 hours. 'I can guarantee it to you guys,' he said to them both, with more sincerity than anything Eric Prydz-related deserves. A day later, Poulter revealed he'd joined their ranks. Brothers in arms, legs; not the same boys that they used to be. 'Warfare' is released in cinemas in the US and UK on April 11. Rochelle Beighton conducted interviews for this article.
CNN
08-04-2025
- Entertainment
- CNN
‘Warfare' wants to be the most authentic Iraq War film yet. Can Young Hollywood and an ex-Navy SEAL accomplish the mission?
'Warfare,' the new film co-directed by Alex Garland ('Civil War,' 'Ex Machina') and former US Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, knows it's going to give audiences a rough ride, so it starts off with a laugh. The nostalgic throbs of Eric Prydz's 2004 hit 'Call on Me' rise through the theater before it's infamous video – a crotch-thrusting pastiche of John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis's antics in 1985's 'Perfect' – appears on screen. (In IMAX, it's quite something.) We're seeing what a SEAL team is watching on a laptop screen at a military barracks near Baghdad. Suffice to say, they're into it. These men, barely out of childhood, could be spring breakers if not for the fatigues and rifles. They go wild when the bass drops. The next time we hear a boom, it won't be such fun. Culled from the memories of Mendoza and his former unit, 'Warfare' is a taught retelling of a mission gone sideways during the Iraq War in 2006. Mendoza's team was engaged in a surveillance mission in Ramadi when the house they were occupying came under attack, throwing the team into a fight for survival without the usual backup. The movie stars a Young Hollywood who's who of internet boyfriends (Charles Melton, Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, Kit Connor, Noah Centineo and more) including 'Reservation Dogs'' D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai as Mendoza. But the film has no time for matinee idols or Hollywood heroism, casting them as highly competent cogs in a machine that prizes teamwork over individual valor. Garland and Mendoza, who met when the latter consulted on 2024's 'Civil War,' thrashed out a framework for the script, before interviewing members of the unit to flesh out the details. 'It's an exercise in trying to recreate a real sequence of events as accurately as possible,' Garland told CNN. 'Were there discrepancies and conflicts in peoples' memories? Absolutely,' he recalled. 'Very often there were partial memories … then it became a sort of forensic reconstruction: If this thing is true and this thing is true, then that must also be true.' 'We needed a very simple rule,' he added, 'that the film would just include what happened.' The result is a movie with a laser-focused viewpoint and little to no exposition. There's also plenty of military jargon, both befuddling and comical ('Is he peeking or probing?' one soldier earnestly asks about a combatant). Mendoza positions the movie as a corrective to so much of what he and other veterans have seen before. 'Traditionally, the people who are making movies about war haven't experienced it,' he said. (John Ford, John Huston, Oliver Stone and others might disagree, but in recent years the statement is broadly true.) Previous filmmaking about the Iraq War 'oftentimes doesn't connect with me, doesn't connect with most veterans,' Mendoza added. 'They may shoot something that's really cool … but for the most part, (veterans are) like, 'yeah, they got that wrong,' or 'that's not how we talk,' or 'that's not how the culture is,' or 'we're being misrepresented in how we handle stress.'' Seeking to remedy this, the former SEAL put his cast through a three-week bootcamp ahead of production in the UK last year. The actors received weapons training, lessons in radio comms, tactical maneuvering and military first aid. 'Ray is a hell of a teacher,' said Cosmo Jarvis, who plays Elliot Miller, to whom the film is dedicated. 'The bootcamp did two things for us,' said Poulter, 'it gave us a condensed technical skill set in order to play a Navy SEAL and it also bonded us all in an amazing way. So the emotional side of things naturally took care of itself.' 'We probably spent eight weeks with each other,' recalled Melton. 'It was 6am to 6pm every day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. We didn't spend any time in the trailers, we were really just this family.' Despite its trim 95-minute runtime, the movie takes its time to get going. That's notable, argued Quinn. 'Especially with Hollywood portrayals of war, or things of that nature, I think that there's a melody or rhythm that filmmaking can fall into where nothing boring happens,' said the actor. In reality, 'there's so much downtime, and these men have to fill that downtime. The contrast between being idle and bored, and then being in a very perilous, dangerous situation, is quite interesting.' Unlike previous war movies that have dealt in the exceptional (think 'Saving Private Ryan' and its mission to extract Matt Damon's Ryan; 'Black Hawk Down' and its headline-making raid gone bad; 'The Hurt Locker' and its skilled and tormented bomb disposal expert) there's a grim sense that what happened to the SEAL team in 'Warfare' was commonplace. The violence, when it arrives, is brief, but its repercussions are explored in graphic and intimate detail. 'The intimacy was shared,' said Quinn, whose character Sam is at the sharp end of things. 'We were all there in the room … We weren't alone in what we were doing. And that was a kind of beautiful thing to come out of a very violent context – quite dark, I suppose.' For Mendoza, the reconstruction was an opportunity to process the trauma of events two decades ago. 'It's a never-ending process,' he said. 'Just because the war is over, it doesn't mean that it's over for us – in the sense of living with these things, or learning how to understand them, and learning how to convey them to people that you love.' 'Once I got out of the military, a lot of these mechanisms that I used to function (in the Navy) didn't necessarily serve me well when I got out. So there's a lot of work to do on one's self. Finding a new career in this industry – storytelling – I felt was therapeutic.' Mendoza has said he wanted to remind people that America's wars are fought by its youth. It's a point exemplified by fresh-faced 'Heartstopper' alum Kit Connor. 'I've just turned 21. I was 20 at the time of making it,' Connor said. 'I look younger than most of the soldiers that you would see on the big screen.' Garland bristles at the idea the movie contains a message. When asked what the film wanted to communicate to audiences about the Iraqi people it features, the director shot back. 'The film does not have the agenda you're implying it does,' he replied. 'It is not attempting to telegraph a message. It's attempting to telegraph information, and it's telegraphing the information in as honest a way as it can.' 'Warfare' ends with a coda that I won't spoil here, but it offers a moment of grace the film is crying out for after the action preceding it. It leaves an impression – though not as indelible as the one shared by the cast. In a nod to their new brothers in arms status and Prydz's lyric, many of the actors got matching tattoos reading 'call on me.' '(It) was something that was more of a symbolic expression that represented our bond,' said Melton. 'Wherever we are in the world, our thing is you can call on me.' 'Mine is on my left thigh,' he added. 'Mine's on my left thigh, too,' said Woon-A-Tai. Poulter, late to the party, said he would get his done within the next 24 hours. 'I can guarantee it to you guys,' he said to them both, with more sincerity than anything Eric Prydz-related deserves. A day later, Poulter revealed he'd joined their ranks. Brothers in arms, legs; not the same boys that they used to be. 'Warfare' is released in cinemas in the US and UK on April 11. Rochelle Beighton conducted interviews for this article.
