‘Warfare’ Review: Alex Garland Makes One of the Most Effective War Movies Ever

The immersive account of a real incident involving Navy SEALs in Iraq shows an unvarnished view of war The post ‘Warfare’ Review: Alex Garland Makes One of the Most Effective War Movies Ever appeared first on TheWrap.

Mar 29, 2025 - 01:40

‘Warfare’ Review: Alex Garland Makes One of the Most Effective War Movies Ever

In discarding Hollywood tropes in favor of truth, the makers of “Warfare” have crafted one of the most viscerally powerful stories about combat ever filmed.

Co-written and co-directed by Alex Garland (“Civil War,” “Ex Machina”) and Ray Mendoza, the deeply immersive film tells the true story of one chaotic, terrifying day experienced by Navy SEALs on a 2006 surveillance mission in Ramadi, Iraq. It aims for utter authenticity, usually shunted aside in favor of what Hollywood thinks viewers want instead — a three-act structure, clear hero and villains, an easily digestible message, spectacular firefights. “Warfare” ignores those expectations in order to create an inescapably inside-the-nightmare, nearly real-time narrative. It relies only on the memories of those who were actually there, as collected by Mendoza, who himself was one of the SEALs pinned down in the house under siege that day.

They’re constantly under fire and can’t pinpoint all the sources. They’re surrounded, outnumbered and their attackers are armed to the teeth. And Garland and Mendoza just show it to us without telling us how to feel about it.

There’s no score. No slo-mo, flashy editing, crazy camera moves or shocking-and-awing gunfights. The actual on-screen body count is low; we rarely see whether shots hit their targets, despite thousands of rounds being fired. The narrative is constructed with long, extended takes, raising even higher the stress of being trapped in that situation. In fact, it’s only in the rare instances when we feel the filmmakers’ thumbs on the scale that “Warfare” loses its balance — as when it expresses the bell-rung SEALs’ dazed confusion a few too many times. But that’s a minor quibble with a movie that admirably stays out of its own way.

To say the film bears no resemblance to the usual Hollywood depiction of war is about as high a compliment as I can pay it. That doesn’t mean the story is without meaning. Perhaps the most effective way to convey that war is hell is to dump all the metaphors, story beats and shoehorned character development and just put the viewer in it, which this film accomplishes in a way very rarely seen in narrative cinema.

It dispenses with all that “here’s a picture of my sweetheart” nonsense and throws us in the deep end. As “Black Hawk Down” succeeded in doing, it makes us forget the politics, and even the mission of the moment, putting us in the fighters’ boots as they just try to stay alive. And these are Navy SEALs, among our best-trained, highest-level warriors, who are desperately fighting to survive.

“Warfare” doesn’t bother to argue about good guys and bad. In fact, one of the tactics the SEALs use in their last-ditch escape attempt should have audiences gasping at its consequences. But in that moment of extreme danger, you comprehend why they’re doing it.

While Mendoza’s account is from the U.S. perspective, and his love for his comrades is clear, the experience is not romanticized. When one of these guys is grievously injured, his piercing cries of agony haunt much of the rest of the film’s soundtrack.

It’s very hard to imagine that an impressionable young person watching this movie would come out thinking, “That was cool! I can’t wait to do that!”

The acting is appropriately rooted in realism. There are no star turns, just a fine young cast (led by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn and Charles Melton) convincingly looking like well-trained operators in a completely life-or-death situation. The ensemble’s work is impeccable and without a trace of vanity.

Cineastes may pull for “Warfare” to win at the box office because it could help impress on the industry how those artificial, familiar requirements — the same old structure, characters, conflicts, the same old “cool” view of combat — are simply not needed for a movie to be embraced by audiences.

One sign of how un-Hollywood the film is: While I think it should be an early contender for screenplay awards, its most memorable line of dialogue is one character simply wailing, “Why? Why? Why?” That distraught screaming rang in my memory long after leaving the theater.

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