Since it first emerged and developed as an art form, cinema has created and refined numerous genres. Used as a marketing tool, and to allow an audience to make an informed choice of what to watch, the principle of any genre is that you know what you are going to get.
Warfare has been placed firmly within the ‘war movie’ genre. The marketing, from the poster to the numerous interviews with the cast and co-writer and director Alex Garland (Civil War; 28 Days Later; Dredd) has focused on the camaraderie built amongst the ensemble cast, and how the story is based on the memories of the real team who fought this mission.
But Warfare is not trying to be a typical genre movie, and Garland has explained repeatedly why he believes that he and the film’s other co-writer Ray Mendoza have taken a sledgehammer to the conventions and expected character tropes.
Much has been made of the cast’s pre-production period bonding, with them shaving each other’s heads, undergoing a three-week bootcamp, and even going so far as to get matching tattoos. The real veterans who served on this mission were also present on set, and there has been frequent mention of this all being for the benefit of squad member Elliott Miller (Cosmo Jarvis: Shogun; The Alto Knights), badly wounded during the mission, and with little memory of what happened to him. All of this is intended to make us believe that this is not merely a standard issue ‘guns with hearts of gold and a definitive narrative arc’ war movie.
In some ways, Garland and Mendoza really have smashed expectations to smithereens. In most war movies, we’d spend the first half of act one developing the characters in the squad. You’d probably learn all about the family background of Tommy (Kit Connor: The Wild Robot; His Dark Materials; Heartstopper), the young newcomer on his first mission. Someone would have a wife at home expecting their first child. Grumpy Lieutenant Macdonald (Michael Gandolfini: Daredevil: Born Again; The Many Saints of Newark) would either be revealed to have a heart of gold, or an appropriately grizzly back story.
No such careful development here. The audience has to glean everything it can about the characters in a pre-title card sequence that also features the only music in the entire film: Eric Prydz’s 2004 floor-filler ‘Call on Me’, known for its video pastiching a 1980’s keep-fit class. The characters’ reactions to this: all of them varying degrees of hyper-masculinity, and unquestioned by anyone, is all the introduction we are given before we find ourselves plunged into the action.
Whilst complaints about ‘dumbing down’ of films and other pop culture texts are all too prevalent, Warfare perhaps swings too far in the opposite direction. The only explanation for anything within the movie is that ‘MAMS’ stands for ‘Military Aged Males’. Everything else must be deduced by the audience.
Whilst an American audience might realise that the squad is a US Navy SEAL unit, a British audience is unlikely to be able to draw this conclusion, and will probably guess that the squad consists of regular army soldiers, similar to those the British Army sent into Iraq in the same period when the events portrayed here occurred. This mis-understanding probably won’t make much difference to the average response of a British audience watching this film – but it will mean that the fetishisation of the Navy SEALS within the US Military may not register.
As the film’s story and script are based on the memories of the real SEALS, there are points when what is happening is unclear, especially when the action explodes, and characters talk over each other. This is perhaps to be expected, although it is also perhaps surprising just how few lines some of the characters speak.
The overall lack of dialogue, and non-existent back stories have given the cast a mountain to climb. They acquit themselves well. Gandolfini is quiet and aloof, but mostly sensible and in control. Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things; A Quiet Place: Day One; Gladiator II) as Sam gives a moving performance which also manages to encompass one of the film’s few humourous moments.
We are also given barely any background about why the squad are where they are – although the thrust of this can be gleaned as the main action of the film begins. Whilst an American audience may be familiar with the nuances of the second Battle of Ramadi, a British audience which was never as keen on the Iraqi War happening, is less likely to understand how the team, and the US forces, have got to the point of undertaking the kind of mission shown here.
Technically, the film is extremely accomplished. When the film is loud, it is ear-shatteringly so. As you’d expect from a war movie set in this century, the gunfire is loud. The air support brought in to provide ‘a display of total force’ is so loud you may think your seat is shaking. But for much of the first half of the film, what is notable is how quiet everything is.
The quiet, and the sense of anticipation, allow for the world of the film to be appreciated. Mark Digby and Michelle Day’s work on the production design is astonishing. The entire film has been shot on location in south east England, and Digby and Day constructed the Ramadi house and surrounding streets and buildings on a disused airfield. It’s a quite brilliant realisation. And a sobering thought that the sheer normalcy of the houses, and the lives of those who live in them, can be disrupted so fully, forcefully and unexpectedly.
We should however ask how accurate all of this is. Given that much has been made of the fact that everything on screen is based on memory, then it must be said that some people involved appear to have the most incredible and detailed memories of very precise moments. Given that Connor’s Tommy cannot even identify that it was an IED that causes the central point of tension, and that D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai’s (Reservation Dogs) Ray appears to be disassociating for much of the final act of the film, it is only reasonable to question the veracity of the claims to vérité that the film-makers have emphasised.
What a reader may wish to know is whether the film is ‘good’ or ‘bad’, but this is far too simplistic a binary for this specific film, which is as much an exercise in unconventional film-making as it is a constructed version of a reality. There is much to fascinate and interrogate here, from the choices made by the co-writers, to the choices made by Fin Oates in the editing suite.
At the end, the Americans vanish, as quickly as they arrived, leaving a restored calm behind, but a trail of destruction in their wake. If Garland and Mendoza’s intention was to produce a film which acts as a metaphor for American colonialism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, then in this they have succeeded.
However, they have still made a war movie. And irrespective of how terribly young many of the characters are, and even if it is ‘based on memories’, this is still a movie in which the Americans are the good guys, feeling entitled to take whatever they want in a foreign land, destroying everything they touch when the locals have the audacity to fight back.
On a cautionary note, you may expect that, even though this is a war movie, that conventions around how injuries to individuals are depicted will be adhered to. This is not the case, and there is an awful lot of blood, and a number of scenes that contain some very graphic shots of dead and severely injured fighters. This may well be regarded as a step too far for some audience members used to a more stylised or even sanitised presentation of traumatised bodies. Be warned that no punches are pulled, and this section of the film can be difficult to watch.
Where Warfare succeeds is as an epic experiment in film-making: long takes; extended moments of quiet; a muted colour palette; the lack of a soundtrack; a requirement for the actors to immerse themselves into their roles – even when they have no lines for extended periods.
Warfare is a film that exists to allow one man to witness what happened to him on the day that changed his life. In that, it is undoubtedly successful. As a challenge to the expected tropes of the war movie genre, it must surely also be judged as a success. That the successes the film does have come at the expense of a more traditional narrative arc and character developments, must surely be regarded as a feature, not a bug.
There is no resolution within the film. No feeling that either side has ‘won’, merely a sense of relief and surprise that most of the combatants, on both sides, have survived. This is very much a film which demands that you think. And that time spent in reflection may lead to us asking ourselves a deeper question, concerning why we demand that stories based on the truth must be tidily resolved, when we are all too aware that real life so often fails to offer such neatness.
Ultimately, Warfare is worth seeing as a reminder that, however much technology evolves, war involves two forces fighting against each other, and that the casualties will inevitably be the young men, and the unwilling residents dragged into a conflict outside their control.
Warfare is released in cinemas in the UK on Friday 18th April 2025
