By eschewing any hint of character or narrative, Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland clearly want to punt audiences straight into the foxhole. But the result is a cinematically vacuous thing.Supplied
Warfare
Written and directed by Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland
Starring D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter and Charles Melton
Classification N/A; 95 minutes
Opens in theatres April 11
If, as French filmmaker François Truffaut once said, “there is no such thing as an anti-war film” – that the very act of making a war movie winds up glorifying the thrill of combat, the camaraderie of brothers-in-arms solidarity – then the new drama Warfare is the most banal kind of recruitment ad. Alternately tedious, cacophonous and stultifying, the latest show of force from writer-director Alex Garland following last year’s equally frustrating Civil War just might be the most unnecessarily unpleasant cinematic experience you will endure this year.
Co-written and co-directed with Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza, who was a consultant on Civil War, the new film recreates one particularly gone-sideways mission from Mendoza’s time in Ramadi. Stitching together the memories of Mendoza’s real-life team members, the film is split roughly into two halves, each unfolding in something close to real time.
The first section follows a group of Navy Seals (along with their two Iraqi scouts) as they take up residence in a seemingly deserted residential neighbourhood, guarding for insurgents. For close to half an hour, the mostly anonymous soldiers – you’ll be lucky to glean a rank and/or name, forget any defining characteristics – sit silently and watch the streets outside. But then all hell breaks loose, and the film becomes consumed with the deafening echo of gunfire and the unceasing wails of wounded soldiers until the mission and story abruptly come to a close.
By eschewing any hint of character or narrative, Mendoza and Garland clearly want to punt audiences straight into the foxhole – to create an immersive experience that is as merciless and confusing as war itself. But the result is a cinematically vacuous thing – more of an exhausting virtual-reality psy-op than an actual film.
There is simply nothing to hold onto here as the filmmakers set off one clanging IED after another, the only tension resting on figuring out exactly which handsome up-and-coming actor is the one responsible for the impressively sustained wailing that soundtracks the film’s final 45 minutes. (I’m fairly sure it’s Kit Connor, but it could just as easily be Joseph Quinn.)
While Garland’s Civil War was agonizingly vague and rather cowardly in its refusal to define exactly what its central schism was about, for fear of offending a portion of its potential audience, Warfare is more politically confused. No one on-screen talks about why exactly they have travelled halfway around the world to die, but every single body (and the soldiers are all bodies, more so than people) is set up as a paragon of courage and honour, proud to defend something, even if it ultimately ends up being a big old nothing.
This war-is-hell-but-warriors-are-forever mentality is given another backward salute in the film’s bizarre and lengthy closing montage, during which images of the cast are juxtaposed against the Iraq vets who they are playing. Not only do we get some oddly jocular behind-the-scenes footage that suggests it’s all fun and games so long as no one (American) gets hurt, but more than half of the real-life troops whose stories the film is based on have their images blurred. Presumably, this is for security reasons as many are still active in the field.
But the intentional obfuscation also accidentally doubles as an admission that no matter how technically accurate Warfare might be, the film is operating from a vantage point where it is all too easy to blur the lines between verisimilitude and emptiness.
During the film’s impressively heavy-duty press tour, Warfare’s cast – including Canadian actor D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, who plays a version of Mendoza, and Charles Melton, a standout from Todd Haynes’s 2023 melodrama May December – have been careful to note the amount of intense preparation they took on, their boot-camp bonding leading several actors to get matching tattoos.
But for all that pain and permanent ink to lead to Warfare? Not even Uncle Sam would want such a thing.
