‘Warfare’ review: A nebulous, empty disservice to the reality of war and memory
Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s harrowing wartime drama is hampered by an inscrutable lack of context and a refusal to reckon with the Iraq War’s lasting consequences.
The cast of “Warfare.” Photo courtesy of A24.
“If your pictures aren’t good enough, you aren’t close enough.” So said Robert Capa, the renowned Hungarian war photographer from whom Alex Garland took a few tips for his previous film, 2024’s “Civil War.” Capa died in the 50s, but his words ring truer than ever in the midst of a vast generational focus shift in the art of warfare and the media surrounding it. The popularity of the sweeping war epic set in distant jungles and fields has mostly faded, eclipsed by a newfound love for tightly choreographed invasion combat scenarios. We watch police teams fight through urban apartment blocks in “The Raid;” online, we do battle in cartoon villages in “Fortnite” and houses both decrepit and deluxe in “Rainbow Six Siege.” And in doing so, we condition ourselves to accept a new breed of warfare, in which our homes can be converted into battlegrounds. As a civilian, you may not go to war, but rest assured. The war will be brought to you.
The notion of space, and Deleuzian reinterpretations of it, dominate warfare in the postmodern era. Gone are the Great Wars’ strict boundaries between the private domain of the civilian home and the liminal countryside no-man’s-land demarcated for “real” combat. Now, in a world where the word “civilian” might as well be synonymous with “collateral damage,” combatants strategically “reinterpret,” colonise, and convert the private into the liminal; turning urban homes into thoroughfares for tactical warfare, through a process aptly and repulsively dubbed “infestation” in none other than the IDF’s military strategy playbook.
The word “infestation” carries with it the suggestion of festering, unwanted proximity — bringing us back to both a bad faith reading of Capa’s quote, and the core of Garland and Mendoza’s filmmaking ethos with “Warfare.” In a perverse reinterpretation of Capa’s words, “Warfare” zeroes in on a platoon of Navy SEALs carrying out an operation during the Battle of Ramadi in Iraq, documenting their every move over a single day in November 2006 in excruciating detail, from pre-combat setup (during which they invade an Iraqi family’s home and convert it into their own temporary barracks), to combat itself, to their eventual extraction and evacuation. As the film proudly announces at the very start, “Warfare” is based entirely on first-hand accounts of combat from its onscreen platoon’s real-life counterparts, including Mendoza himself. “Everything is based on memory,” reads the film’s Letterboxd tagline solemnly.
It seems like an intriguing hook at first; the promise of an “authentic,” highly-detailed and immersive war movie underscored by frequent Garland collaborator Glenn Freemantle’s undeniably excellent sound design. But as the film’s runtime progresses, it feels as if viewers are only drawn ever deeper into unending acontextual violence rather than any semblance of real memory. Despite being based on real people, the soldiers in the film do not feel like real human beings; they come with no narratives or backstories or even any hints at deeper connections beyond their proximity to each other on screen.
With “Warfare,” Garland has fallen into the same writing trap that he has continually stumbled headlong into since 2022’s misguided pseudo-feminist misstep “Men” — his characters are as empty as the shell casings they leave behind; entirely defined by their reactions to their surroundings and exhibiting no real capacity or innate motive to act. In fact, it would be nigh on impossible to tell any of the platoon members apart if they weren’t played by ten of the world’s most telegenic male heartthrobs, by whose real names most viewers will end up mentally referring to their characters by, given the almost complete lack of meaningful interaction occurring between any of them. The detail, the closeness with which we see them organise their movements (often rendered in unintelligible military jargon) is not afforded to any other aspects of their characterisation.
Besides, the assertion that “everything is based on memory” isn’t even entirely true. At times, we are shown brief flashes of the Iraqi family’s point of view as they react to the brutal conquest of their family home with confusion and terror — scenes which, unless Mendoza or any of his fellow Navy SEALs are clairvoyant, are clearly the result of artistic liberties beyond any firsthand accounts they could have received. Why, then, make that assertion at all? One can only assume that Garland and Mendoza have deployed that statement defensively, as both an attempt to classify “Warfare” as something other than unabashed military propaganda, and an excuse for the film’s alarming lack of respect for its Iraqi characters, who are in turn belittled, dismissed, or altogether excluded from the film’s focus despite serving as the only real contextual links between these Navy SEALs and the foreign soil on which they now do battle.
In addition to the family whose home has been so unceremoniously invaded, the American platoon is aided by two Iraqi soldiers who also serve as the group’s translators; they are noticeably treated with far less decorum than any of their American allies, and only one of them is credited at the end. The Iraqi insurgents that the SEALs find themselves surrounded by also remain faceless, marked only by their headscarves and the occasional flash of a bootlegged assault rifle. “Warfare” may just stop short of flat-out lionising its subjects, but Garland and Mendoza’s choice to foreground memory — and the collective memory of the oppressor, no less — as the driving force behind the film results in what The Guardian’s award-winning Iraq War correspondent Peter Beaumont calls “censorship by default,” trivialising the film’s very message. By failing to present the Iraqi people as anything beyond cardboard cutouts; tools to be utilised when the narrative deems it convenient and to be put away neatly out of sight when white male American suffering must take center stage once again, all this fighting we see onscreen means absolutely nothing. As Beaumont says, “The war is merely something that happens to these American soldiers. It is an experience to be endured and nothing more.”
The same could be said, to an extent, of watching the film itself — even its highly impressive sound design eventually becomes something to be endured; the film something to begrudgingly pay attention to because you have paid for a ticket, and not because you were unfamiliar with its core message that, big surprise! War is brutal. Moral misgivings aside, “Warfare” is Garland’s most technically competent film, mostly if not entirely thanks to Freemantle’s endeavours in the sound booth, the likes of which are guaranteed to rattle viewers’ bones to the core when booming out of the speakers in an IMAX theatre. But sound design alone cannot carry an entire film, and without any real narrative meaning to root these soundscapes in, we are merely left with what might as well be glorified ASMR tracks; 96 minutes of sonically accurate bullets ricocheting off concrete that would be a lot more impressive to listen to if it was backed up by a film that didn’t suffer from a terminal lack of incuriosity about its own context and characters.
In the past, Garland has displayed a similar reluctance to engage in any kind of political partisanship with his films. His previous outing, 2024’s “Civil War,” declined to pick sides in its own dystopia, and even refused to outright condemn one of its central figures, a fictional American president at the head of an unconstitutional, authoritarian regime who seized power for an illegal third term in office. That same unwillingness to engage with his own material once again presents itself with “Warfare,” arguably to more disastrous effect. While it could be said that the impartiality of “Civil War” ties into its central focus on wartime journalism and photography, the same cannot be said about the very act of war itself. If Garland believes that acontextuality equates to impartiality, and that impartiality shields him and Mendoza from accusations of having thoughtlessly created yet another military recruitment advertisement set during one of the most disgusting instances of American imperialism… well, he would be very much mistaken.
Throughout the making of the brutally claustrophobic combat sequences in “Warfare,” it’s clear that Garland and Mendoza continually kept Robert Capa’s old adage in mind. It’s also clear that they never once stopped to ask themselves if Capa was right; if proximity really does equate to quality. Capa’s quote was uttered in a bygone time — a time where people were far less desensitised to violence, a time when every new photo from the front lines delivered a fresh injection of horror straight to the vein of the public consciousness. Now, in an age where we simulate the horrors of the urban battlefield for a bit of Friday night fun with the boys on “Call of Duty,” making such a derivative and insular film set during one of the darkest stains on American history feels misguided at best and flat-out repugnant at worst. “Warfare” has nothing new to say, and nothing to offer that isn’t entirely self-reflexive. The film promises an honest, unflinching look at the realities of combat, but shoots itself in the foot by shrouding itself in an inscrutable lack of context and a complete and utter refusal to reckon with any of the key people, places, and lasting consequences of the actual war in Iraq. What we end up with is a movie that manages to be many things at once — a successful exercise in sound design, a failed exercise in meaningful filmmaking, and most importantly, a timely parable that proximity and impartiality do not and cannot coexist.
