Procedures and processes ground Warfare in the concrete facts of war. The new film co-directed by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza is a different kind of war movie. The history of war cinema leans into manipulative embellishment — whether critical or propagandistic — but Warfare opts for neutral observation. The concussive firefight at its center is meant to move the audience, not by ideological design, but through a visceral empathy for the totemic terror of what these reconstructed recollections represent. Warfare consists of an isolated incident of war that plays out in real time, and its modus operandi is simple: to experientially recreate the ebb and flow of a real conflict. To that end, it succeeds — with petrifying results.
Warfare begins in medias res. Circa 2006, a platoon of Navy SEALs is stationed in Ramadi — a city in central Iraq composed of urban marketplaces, abandoned buildings with low-lying open rooftops, and labyrinthian narrow streets — a place crawling with suspected Al Qaeda insurgents. The landscape is surreal, as though the devil himself designed a battleground fit for ambushes and the deployment of makeshift roadside bombs. The SEALs are conducting surveillance on the area and as such, garrison a multi-story concrete building occupied by a couple families. The SEALs sit in watchful wait, tracking suspects, until a firefight erupts and they are attacked from all sides.
Warfare is about memory. Ray Mendoza served 16 years as a Navy SEAL. During one particular operation in the height of the Iraq War, his dear friend and fellow SEAL Elliot Miller was so badly concussed and wounded that he retained no memory of the events. Mendoza has spent the years since wanting to create a recollection, built upon his own memory and the memory of his unit, about what it was really like. After working as military advisor on Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024), the pair have zoomed in on the grounded moments of military realism in that movie and made a new movie just a year later that is entirely that, with no fluff or filling. That movie is Warfare, dedicated to Elliot Miller, who alongside the stand-in for Mendoza, is a central character in the film.
So it goes like this: Warfare is not a story about heroes. It’s about a reconnaissance mission that ends in retreat. There is no glory here. What it shows is that in the heat of war, even retreat is hard and brutal. Two of the men have been badly injured and evac is not coming fast enough. Meanwhile, they are surrounded by suppressive fire from all angles and improvised explosives around the building. They’re really in the shit now, in the eye of the storm of dust-choked confusion offering no quarter.
Warfare begins… with aerobics? In particular, with the music video to Eric Prydz’s 2004 banger “Call on Me,” featuring gyrating young men and women in ‘80s-like aerobics wear. Then the camera slowly, imperceptibly pulls out. We are not watching a music video. We are watching some SEALs watching a music video on base. It’s all camaraderie and fist-pumping good vibes, bros being bros. Then, the rest of the movie happens.
Cut to silence and a dusty Ramadian street. The silence plays louder than the rave. Then we get to the house these men will occupy the rest of the movie and it’s all quiet on the Iraqi front. It’s work processes. Notating people coming and going from the market. Posting up with a sniper rifle and tracking a few suspicious individuals. Then, the market clears, and still, we hangout in quiet, knowing it’s about to get loud.
Then it does. A grenade is popped in through the window. A disorienting explosion. All hell breaks loose. Assault rifles report like hellfire. The sound design is concussive. The sounds of the guns inside moved to the forefront of the audio mix so they’ll rattle in your head and shake your seat in the theater. The gunshots from outside, suppressed, their source unknowable and hidden behind nooks and unseen corners of rows of buildings blending into the dust storm.
We descend into a kind of audiovisual madness. The design is clear and loud now. The mix feels inventive, in that it creates so much context of space that we have an audiovisual understanding of the building unlike other war movies. Because the action is so contained, our sense of place is essential, and we are confined, right along with the SEALs. Sure, we can feel everything they might, except we are safe behind a screen, watching people who are exposed and vulnerable to everything.
It’s clear pretty early: there is no winning condition here. There’s not even so much as a mission directive. There’s only several ways to lose and the way to lose while taking the fewest losses until evac.
Exceptionally cast, Warfare feels like a projected future, a movie we will look back at and say, look how it predicted the stardom of several breakout actors. Come back in five years and see if D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Finn Bennett, Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton, Noah Centineo, and Michael Gandolfini are not at least several of our stars who appear in everything we make. Warfare seems like a guarantee they will be.
Warfare is as novel as war movies come. You can make an argument we do not need any more war movies pretty soundly. We do not. Do not need them like we’ve been making them. If we must make more about Iraq, make them like Warfare, as honestly as possible about what it’s like, free from apparent propaganda or misplaced scorn for those who served, a movie that understands not just the War in Iraq but our country’s deeply complicated relationship to what happened there, and how those who returned came back not to fanfare but public indifference. Like the war itself, it’s all hell and chaos, and then seems to result in nothing. The movie then just ends and you realize there was never any win condition for anyone involved, just different ways to lose, and it hits home, war is hell and there are no heroes — there is only death and survival.