By Jake Wilson
WARFARE
MA, 95 minutes
I’ve never been anywhere near an active war zone – and as far as I know, the British filmmaker Alex Garland (Ex Machina) hasn’t either. Still, I’m willing to believe that Warfare has an authenticity that most war films lack, instilled by its co-writer and co-director Ray Mendoza, a former US Navy SEAL who worked as a technical adviser on Garland’s 2024 Civil War.
Kit Connor in Warfare, which has an authenticity that most war films lack.Credit: AP
Unfolding over 90 minutes of “real time,” the film is based on an incident that happened to Mendoza’s platoon in Iraq in 2006, which he and Garland have recreated as literally as possible on sets in the UK, relying on memory and a handful of photographs.
Part of what feels instantly believable is that the “action” involves a good deal of waiting around. The main location is a sparsely furnished house in Ramadi which has been commandeered by Mendoza (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) and his team, looking out onto a dusty street mostly empty of traffic.
This is the ominous kind of quiet, instilling a tension that leaves little room for small talk. The clipped dialogue is full of cryptic military jargon: the characters repeatedly send radio requests for a “show of force,” which turns out to mean having jets fly low overhead.
All this is disorientating, but not as disorientating as the violence that abruptly breaks out. As the characters lose sight of each other in the smoke, the camera dwells on hideous wounds or dismembered limbs with a certain morbid relish – though this can also be seen as an effort to convey the shock of realising such things occur in the real world, not just in hyperbolic horror movies like Garland’s 2022 Men.
While conventional entertainment value may not be the film’s strength, Garland and Mendoza have taken some impressive risks in throwing many of the rules of drama out the window.
The cast is full of buzzed-about young actors, such as Will Poulter as the commanding officer and Cosmo Jarvis as a sniper. But they’re encouraged to do as little visible acting as possible: the characters are individuals with their own separate fates, but also make up a unified force pitted against a largely offscreen foe.
The cast of Warfare is full of buzzed-about young actors who are encouraged to do as little visible acting as possible.Credit: AP
The question of how this unity is defined isn’t entirely straightforward, as we see towards the end when a second team arrives at the house, and earlier through the peripheral presence of a pair of Iraqi translators (Nathan Altai and Donya Hussen), aligned with Mendoza and the others yet set apart.
In its handling of such matters, Warfare is significantly more nuanced than it might have been. But if it’s more than a technical stunt, it’s less than a fully satisfying achievement: as in much of Garland’s work, there’s a tendency to veer between bluntness and evasion.
If he and Mendoza have a definite view about war in general or this war specifically, they’re not letting on – and when they swerve away from an exclusively American perspective at the last moment, it feels mostly like an effort to cover their tracks.
Warfare is in cinemas from April 17.
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