Latest news with #SEALS
Yahoo
12-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
What the realism of "Warfare" obscures
The central value proposition of 'Warfare,' the new Iraq war film co-written and co-directed by ex-Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland, is realism. On a technical level, it hits the mark. As a story about the U.S. war in Iraq, it obscures and sanitizes the conflict it seeks to depict. 'Warfare' is based on a real mission that Mendoza himself participated in, and is constructed from his memories and those of other participants'. In a taut 95 minutes, Mendoza and Garland aim to re-create how a Navy SEAL team conducting a sniper overwatch mission in Iraq, in 2006, was discovered and attacked by insurgent fighters, and the SEAL team's subsequent struggle to make it out alive. Mendoza has described his approach to the story as 'investigative, forensic' and said the threshold for including material was 'if it didn't happen on that day, it wasn't going to be in the film.' A lot of the movie depicts moments of life in combat with a naturalism that is rarely seen on the silver screen. As the SEAL platoon breaks into an Iraqi civilian home and turns it into a makeshift surveillance center, the viewer is immersed in constant, detailed communications about location and the tedious minutiae of intelligence sharing which may or may not be significant. We witness the enervating focus required to monitor city streets with a sniper scope for hours, and mundane banter as a SEAL complains about having lost a shirt. There is a sense of being embedded in there alongside the SEAL team in real time, and the buzz around the movie is about how 'scrupulously realistic' it is. But this movie is not a documentary, nor is it shot like one. This movie is driven by spectacle — specifically, awesome displays of American power and precision. The training and movement of the SEALS, the sophisticated weapons at their command, the way aircraft are deployed in 'show of force' maneuvers to deter insurgents are central to the entertainment. The film's sometimes-deafening soundscape is a distinct character unto itself, and is designed to immerse the audience in an atmosphere of omnipresent threats and the U.S. military's earth-shattering strength. 'Warfare' is also a horror film. When the humdrum nature of the surveillance mission is interrupted by the SEALs' growing anxiety that they've been 'peeped' by insurgents, the movie shifts gears. The professional commands are quickly overlaid with nervousness, and the film exhibits the camera work, suspenseful pacing, focus on bodies and shocking scares of a horror film. These are deftly handled, exhibiting the seasoned hand of Garland, who has made dark, kinetic thrillers like '28 Days Later' and 'Ex Machina.' In other words, 'Warfare' is not just about what happened to that SEAL platoon that day, but how they felt: The isolation, the fear, the terror. Mendoza has described the making of the film as 'therapeutic' as veterans are rarely afforded the opportunity to discuss 'the emotional components' of what they endure. The end of the film thanks members of the team for 'always answering the call' and shows many of their real life counterparts. The focus in 'Warfare' on the thrill of superior firepower and the framing of U.S. service members as the primary victims of the Iraq war ultimately means we are not in ground-breaking territory. The two buzziest and most influential American films about the conflict, 'The Hurt Locker' and 'American Sniper,' are analogous films in these respects. 'The Hurt Locker' is about an exceptionally skilled and daring leader of a bomb technician squad who becomes consumed by the fight and struggles to adapt to civilian life. 'American Sniper' is about a gifted and self-effacing sniper who is traumatized by the war and also struggles to return to civilian life. The U.S. service members who were traumatized, hurt or killed in a dishonorable war that was waged based on lies deserve our sympathy and support. But let's see the forest for the trees. All three films commit the same perverse inversion of moral common sense. They depict the U.S. invasion and occupation as a precise, restrained operation run by near-perfect warriors with a high regard for civilian life, when it was not. Civilians were tortured and hundreds of thousands were killed through brutal cluster munitions, lax rules of engagement, trigger happy defense contractors, poor intelligence during massive air strikes and a general breakdown of Iraqi society and economy. And even as these movies invite sympathy and admiration for American troops, they treat most or all Iraqis as faceless, spooky villains or two-dimensional props. In 'Warfare,' Iraqi civilians are given scarce screen time and mostly ignored, and the Iraqi soldiers who work with the Americans are depicted as reluctant fighters and cowards. There is no explanation of why there is an insurgency, although the ending of the film hints that the insurgents are unbeatable and that the war is futile. Imagine, for example, watching a movie about Russian soldiers embedded in a hostile Ukrainian town that focuses on the perspective and plight of the Russian invaders and depicts the Ukrainians as monsters and bystanders. Now imagine watching one movie after another about it. That's how Hollywood almost invariably seems to approach the Iraq war. 'Warfare' may be a mostly accurate account within the aperture of the lens that it applies to the war. But its action sequences don't change the true horror story of what happened — a war of aggression based on a false pretext that killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and ruined the lives of millions more. The choice to name the film 'Warfare' underscores the conceit that this movie seeks to capture something essential about warfare with its extraordinary attention to detail. It is also apropos that a movie with such a title narrows the audience's moral universe while training the audience's eyes on a spectacular display of force. This is how terrible wars are rationalized. If we want to overcome this sickness, we ought to think more about who is being shot at, and why. This article was originally published on
Yahoo
28-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Yahoo
Warfare Review: War Movies Rarely Feel This Real
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. One of my go-to gripes about movies these days is that titles tend to really suck. There is a tendency for them to be far too generic and simple, and in their generic simple-ness, they often fail to properly represent the story and/or are totally forgettable (I have a whole special rant about features that go the 'common first name' route that I can save for another time). In a vacuum, Warfare from writer/directors Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland would be a film that I would normally complain about in this context, but in this particular case, the generic and simple title is actually perfect: as its name suggests, it's a cinematic experience of warfare, and it is breathtaking. Warfare Release Date: April 11, 2025Directed By: Ray Mendoza and Alex GarlandWritten By: Ray Mendoza & Alex GarlandStarring: D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Taylor John Smith, Michael Gandolfini, Kit Connor, Finn Bennett, Adain Bradley, Noah Centineo, Evan Holtzman, Henry Zaga, Joseph Quinn, and Charles MeltonRating: R for intense war violence and bloody/grisly images, and language throughoutRuntime: 94 minutes A high-concept thriller based on a true story, the movie serves to take you back to the year 2006 and embed you with a group of soldiers operating during the Iraq War, and it's an utterly transfixing 94 minutes that flies by as it nails you to your seat in suspense, terrified of what may happen next. It makes no apologies for reality, and it doesn't go through the process of making everything specifically cinematic with dumbed-down jargon, sweeping narrative developments or constructed character arcs. It exists to be a recreation of actual events from the memories of co-director/co-writer Ray Mendoza, and in its impeccable verisimilitude and constant intensity, it's an awesome piece of work. After a perfect opening establishing the period setting, with gleeful soldiers gathering around a laptop to witness the audacious music video for Eric Prydz's 'Call On Me,' a unit of U.S. Navy SEALs executes maneuvers at night in Ramadi, Iraq – insurgent territory – to occupy a two-floor residence. In daylight hours, things are quiet but intense in the apartment building, as various positions are set up to keep an eye on locals and track enemy behavior. The streets are monitored through the lens of a sniper rifle… and when things go to hell, they get there quickly. The unit is discovered and targeted, with shots fired and grenades thrown, but everything goes from bad to worse during an attempted evacuation. The SEALS try to make their way to an armored personnel carrier deployed to their location, but the activation of an improvised explosive device aborts the effort and leaves multiple dead and two badly injured. While enemy fire persists, a rescue operation is initiated, and the soldiers fight to survive while they await backup and extraction. The power of Warfare is found in its focus and intensity, defying cinematic convention in the process. There are no overt efforts to create specific personalities or individually introduce characters and their independent roles, and there are no heart-to-heart conversations or meaningful dialogues about life back home to de-escalate action before ramping things back up again and forge familiar pacing. These are things that I might negatively criticize in other works, but Mendoza and Garland earn this minimalism with clear intentions that end up being extremely powerful and effective. The film's constant mode is realism, and the spell is never broken (which is actually somewhat strange considering that my method of recognizing characters was identifying the various actors in the ensemble from their other works). It never halts action to have soldiers clearly lay out missions and objectives to each other, and radio communication isn't dumbed down as civilian speak. Casual exposition is blissfully non-existent, but everything is also perfectly clear via context and action, and this serves to simply grip you harder amid the action. Despite the familiar faces, you're never specifically reminded that you are watching a movie, and it is hypnotizing and powerful. Set in and around a single location, the scope of Warfare is very small, but that also makes it intimate, and the visceral impact of the filmmaking is massive. Whether it's via tight close ups within the limited confines of the Iraqi household or first-person looks through the scope of a sniper rifle, the cinematography strategically entrenches the audience alongside the film's characters throughout the first act, and thus, when the shit hits the fan, you feel like you are trapped in the nightmare right alongside them. Deserving particularly special mention is the sound design, as no aesthetic aspect of the movie better sells the hell. When the IED explodes and rocks the armored personnel carrier, I felt like my own body was launched 10 feet into the air, and the ratatat and whistling of gunfire practically has you expecting the feeling of plaster dust on your cheeks as your eyes stay fixed on the screen. More than just shocking and terrifying noise, however, the film is also able to lock you into the characters' various perspectives with dangerous ringing silence and a wild sequence of overwhelming radio chatter. This is a movie that you feel. While Alex Garland's works are usually about big ideas – from the meditations on artificial intelligence in Ex Machina to the valor of journalism in Civil War – his collaboration with Ray Mendoza is relatively uncomplicated but equally powerful. Its aim is to convey an experience, and it does so with incredible skill and emotional impact: it immerses you in its terror and horror and actually hits at your fight-or-flight response. It's an unconventional cinematic experience, but it's a deeply effective one.
