Ramadi, Iraq.  2006.  Navy SEAL team Alpha One closes in on a family home, taking it over under the cover of night and turning it into a surveillance station.  Led by Erik (Will Poulter), the Officer in Charge, the team waits out for hours, anxious as their sniper, Elliot (Cosmos Jarvis) begins to suspect that their position has been compromised, and an attack is imminent.  Ray (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), the coms specialist, organizes for an extraction, but when the Bradley tank takes IED fire, the rescue mission is quickly aborted and Alpha One returns to the house to tend to their severely wounded, relying now on Alpha Two, led by Jake (Charles Melton), to lead their rescue and return them to base. 

Ray Mendoza, having served as the military adviser on Alex Garland’s Civil War (2024), writes and directs Warfare under the guidance of Garland for A24.  Based on his own memories of his time as a Navy SEAL, specifically this operation as part of the Second Battle of Ramadi in the Iraq War, the 95-minute film plays out as a tense drama that feels like it unfolds in near real time, placing audiences in the middle of the fray.  The title was quickly put into development after Civil War and bypassed any of the Q1 festivals – a surprise given the buzzy cast assembled by Kharmel Cochrane – instead opening with select advanced screenings to gain some excitement across social media before taking a nationwide bow on 2,670 screens. 

Filmmaking is all about experimentation and playing with the form – it is the only way the medium can grow – but when that commitment to the experiment gets in the way of telling the story, everything unravels.  In this instance, the reliance on memory means that these characters are hardly developed, as we are thrown into a tight-knit group that is already well established with each other, and it would be both unnatural for them to introduce themselves to one another.  We are introduced to this squad as they amp eachotehr up to Eric Prydz’s music video for “Call on Me;” the first half of a damning bookend. Looking back at the root of the idea for Warfare, the replication of memory, this is not just an instance of using historical record and testimony as A24 alumni Robert Eggers often builds his films around, here, Mendoza offers up an almost stream of consciousness tabulation of trauma that would have been much better unpacked in therapy or a journal instead of committed to film.  That is not to discredit the ordeal that he and his team endured, but narratively, it would be nice if these characters actually had something to do beyond just the job.  Of the main few, Tommy (Kit Connor) has it the worst which is frustrating because as the newbie, his shell shock opens up the door to explore the toll of war on these young men, but Mendoza, by this point, only slows the action down to perform some camera tricks before getting back to the bombastic explosions.  For as little context as this affords the soldiers, the Iraqi family whose home has been commandeered are given even less. 

Now, it may be unfair to turn the tables on the film by decrying that it treated the Iraqi citizens as props and the neighborhood as a set dressing, but had it not been framed as a memory Warfare – and, arguably, without Garland as a cosigner – the film would read like a furious wet dream of a man with a hero complex.  It is reductive criticism, but the film itself is reductive of its own thesis that war, when it is not a monotonous routine, is hell; but it is not hell of the soldiers’ own making, an idea that Mendoza barely scratches at which makes it feel so tonedeaf when presented to a modern audience.   

As Serj Tankian screamed into the mic, well ahead of his time and a year before the events portrayed in the film, “Why don’t presidents fight the war? Why do they only send the poor?” Mendoza explores this in flashes, most overtly in Erik handing over the reins of the extraction to Jake after admitting he is unable to make a clear decision after the intense shootout, but also the constant return to Woon-A-Tai as the writer/director’s avatar in the film and whose strength and will are crumbling by the minute, and a panicked Lt. Macdonald (Michael Gandolfini) who hastily and shakenly administers a morphine needle upside-down piercing his own finger.  Mendoza never allows them to actually ask these questions or dare to think about lashing out against their masters, thereby betraying his loose assembly of a thesis and becoming the same hulk of grunting bravado that it almost seems like he was trying to dispel.  Rather, he lets the audience come into his film either champing at the bit to be placed into a warzone that still manages some glitz and glam even if he talks about it as having the hardboiled edge of reality about it, or to have already come to the conclusion that war is a political chess game played by the elite and that more specifically the War on Terror was a decades-spanning, trillion dollar, boondoggle.  To allow him some grace, it is fair to assume that thoughts were elsewhere with these characters because at least in this moment, the young men trapped in the apartment are programmed to kill and not to think, but as a film, the total lack of frustration and the absolute lack of humanity displayed here – either towards the innocent family that have their home invaded and destroyed or just the lack of identity among these characters – is what teeters this film into a gross and exploitative, jingoistic pantomime more than a parable of horror. 

By including the family in the film, Mendoza opens himself up to the possibility of displaying growth, but he just uses them as props to push around and yell at, since, in his version of this story, they are getting in the way of the mission.  This expendable attitude is also extended to the pair of translators, Farid (Nathan Altai) and Noor (Donya Hussen), who accompany the troops.  They are likewise bossed around, degraded, and treated as expendable in a way that the American soldiers are not, despite the irony that the very nature of being a foot soldier in a war means that your government views you as expendable, but even still the translators are forced to be the first out of the building acting as a human shield to take any opening, enemy fire.  Returning to the family and the larger community, Mendoza offers them up a quiet moment at the end of the film that is supposed to be the olive branch extended in solidarity to the family’s home which he helped to hijack and destroy, and had it ended there it would have driven home a salient point about the absurd type of destruction that war causes on not just both, but all sides of the aisle.   

Instead, any good faith reading is quickly erased by an end credits montage that plays out like an alumni quarterback returning to the ol’ stomping grounds to relive his glory days, only here, it is Mendoza reuniting with Elliot on the set of the neighborhood he helped to decimate and a family he helped to traumatize.  Mendoza is seen skipping around like an excitable child while photos of the real soldiers fade in and out on the margins of the screen.  Most of their faces have been blurred, perhaps they are still serving, or perhaps they did not want to be featured in Mendoza’s ego-stroking trip down memory lane, but whatever the reason may be, the final image of the film is Elliot, front and center of the cast and crew photo while they all flip the bird to the camera. 

While thematically Warfare is a predictably disgusting display, technically, it is well put together as Mendoza, under Garland’s tutelage, reaches into the same bag of tricks first seen in Civil War (2024).  The sound design is overwhelming, be it gunfire or screaming, and Fin Oates in the editing suite is able to piece together David J. Thompson’s coverage to create a good bit of dramatic tension. The directorial pair shows a pretty great sense of space throughout the runtime in their blocking of the scenes, giving us a good feel for the apartment they have invaded as the camera passes from room to room. In a shocking bit of restraint, Mendoza seldom allows the camera to linger and track in a oner despite the ideal conditions for such trickery. There is no score, but that does not stop Ben Barker from playing with the levels and layers of diegetic sound that punch through the action of the second half or add texture to the monotony of the opening act. 

Warfare is a misguided effort, despite the technical competence, and is insulated by the fact that it tells a true story that is focused on American combat veterans, and also that it boasts a very popular cast of rising stars from one of the hippest distribution companies in the business today. Once one rubs away the marketing sheen, however, the film has shockingly little to say and for anyone coming to this film already with the understanding that war is a mindless destruction of lives both directly and indirectly through the funneling of massive sums of money to various military budgets, Mendoza offers no deeper introspection which, coincidentally, also falls nicely into this stage of Garland’s career that has grown rather stagnant as he begins to examine deep issues but gets distracted by his own technical ability, offering up another surface level thesis statement from across the pond.  Warfare, ultimately, is Mendoza’s project, and he is obsessed with the fact of showing this film to be what really happened in as real a way as possible. He gets caught up in the action and the brutality of it, borrowing cinematic language and sensationalizing the event without realizing it, and while it is not propoganda in that is shows these boys returning home as gallant heroes – it actually scrathes at the notion in a bit of tragic foreshadowing at the abandonment which veterns often face when they do return home from war – at its core, Warfare is absolutley fetishizing and promoting the camraderie over the horror. Based on memories and it shows as it has all the same energy and oorah mindset of 2006, it is fair to say that in Mendoza’s mind he was making an antiwar film, but simply showing that war is brutal is not the same as rallying against the systems that breed and promote war, so this attempt at therapy and catharsis plays out little more than a live action Call of Duty.