‘The battle scenes in Warfare are brutal and merciless’

This visceral film follows a group of US Navy SEALs over the course of one day in Ramadi in western Iraq and is based on the memories of the soldiers who were there.

A scene from Warfare: ‘There is blood and bone and bravery and courage, but there is nothing glorious or noble.’

Warfare (MA15+)
95 minutes
In cinemas

★★★★

The drawn-from-the-battlefield drama Warfare opens with a group of US Navy SEALs in their barracks, uniformed and armed, watching a Jane Fonda-like exercise video. As the attractive women bump and grind in their leotards, the soldiers shout and dance. At this moment they look like boys with guns.

What follows shows they are anything but. They say war is hell.

This visceral film, shot in real time over the course of a day, proves it. There is blood and bone and bravery and courage, but there is nothing glorious or noble.

It’s November 19, 2006, in Ramadi in western Iraq. Before dawn the SEALs force their way into a two-storey house, confine the family who lives there to a room, and set up camp.

Everything that happens is based on the memories of the soldiers who were there. One of them, Iraq war veteran Ray Mendoza, is the co-writer and co-director, alongside the English filmmaker Alex Garland.

The two met when Mendoza, who works as a military consultant in Hollywood, worked on Garland’s previous film, Civil War, in which a second states-versus-states conflict breaks out in the US.

The two main characters are Mendoza (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), who runs radio communications, and Elliot Miller (Cosmo Jarvis), the lead sniper. The other SEALs are an ensemble cast that includes Michael Gandolfini.

There is no backstory. We don’t know why the SEALs are in this house or anything about them as individuals. That is as it is: they only operate as a team. We don’t know anything about the Iraqis. There is no soundtrack. The idea is to drop the viewer into warfare and immerse them in its minute and minute-by-minute detail, and it works.

“Looks like they’re getting their Jihad on,’’ the sniper says as he watches MAMs (Military-Aged-Males) across the street through his scope.

English actor Cosmo Jarvis, who is in the recent Australian prison drama Inside, opposite Guy Pearce, embodies the sniper. He lies on a mattress, his rifle pointed out a window, men, women and children in his sights. He relays what he sees through the scope. “They’re peaking with serious intent to probe.”

There’s nothing jokey about what he says. The precision of the language is telling. It’s how soldiers speak before hell breaks loose. And once it does, it’s tight, contained, to-the-point. The actors are impressive. It’s like watching war, rather than watching actors acting war.

The opening sequence shows the SEALs preparing for an attack they know will come. It is quiet, tense and, as Shakespeare writes in Henry V, carries a “dreadful note of preparation”.

When hell does break lose, this is not an easy film to watch. The battle scenes are brutal and merciless. And perhaps that is the point Mendoza and Garland want to make in this powerful account of what warfare is. They do not take sides. There are no heroes. There are young men, Americans and Iraqis, killing each other. To return to Henry V: “There are few die well that die in a battle.”