Warfare Review: Alex Garland’s Snapshot of Iraq War Hell

Someone once said the waiting of a thing makes for such sweet sorrow. Sure, but it can also be the source of all anxiety, horror, and unrelenting dread, as proven in Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland’s Warfare. That is until the titular fire and thunder, shock and awe, descends. Then comes the high-pitched screaming and […] The post Warfare Review: Alex Garland’s Snapshot of Iraq War Hell appeared first on Den of Geek.

Mar 28, 2025 - 14:59

Warfare Review: Alex Garland’s Snapshot of Iraq War Hell

Someone once said the waiting of a thing makes for such sweet sorrow. Sure, but it can also be the source of all anxiety, horror, and unrelenting dread, as proven in Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland’s Warfare. That is until the titular fire and thunder, shock and awe, descends. Then comes the high-pitched screaming and a different type of waiting.

Such is Mendoza’s brutal estimation of his time in Iraq during a film with its face so buried in the dirt that you might feel the bullet casings singe your hair. But that comes later, after a deep breath and a long plunge down. Running at only 90 minutes, more than a third of Warfare’s narrative is about the quiet. The shots of kids in camouflage goofing off, reenacting the music video they watched before the mission, or Cosmo Jarvis running his fingers through the dust on a window seal. It’s literally the dirt beneath a fingernail.

One of the most harrowing shots is similarly when a group of young men know they have two minutes before they need to go out the front door of an Iraqi house in Ramadi that they have commandeered. Outside are evac tanks, which they called because they’re surrounded by insurgents. The Navy SEALs, nor we, can see beyond this home’s fences, and certainly not the silhouettes of those who wish them dead. But we know they’re there and what awaits while Garland and Mendoza hold their camera in a long, disinterested wide shot. It lasts just enough for you to clock every actor’s agonized face. Then out they must go, and sure enough it turns out that the readiness is not always all.

Prior to being recruited as a co-writer and director on Warfare, Mendoza worked for more than a decade in the movie business as a technical and military advisor, including on Civil War where he met Garland. That film is celebrated by many for a different understanding of warfare: one that might appeal to the type of adrenaline junkie who could become a war correspondent—or an audience who even in that film’s depressingly prescient scenario can still treat the story as a hypothetical.

Conversely, there is nothing thrilling in the traditional, adventurous sense about Warfare. This is a movie told in real-time and with a visceral sense of chaos and confusion. It casts a murderer’s row of young Millennial and Gen-Z talent like Will Poulter, Jarvis, Joseph Quinn, Kit Connor, Charles Melton, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai as a young version of the film’s co-director, Mendoza. They all play real people who, should they survive, were on the set and discussed their memories with their onscreen opposites. The effect of assembling familiar faces (at least for cinephiles and Broadway heads) is the only fig leaf offered for keeping track of who is who. But the point is less the identities of the men as it is a shared morning during the bloodiest battle in the Iraq War. It binds them and seeks to bind the audience as well to the utter senselessness of its namesake.

The film will assuredly face many critiques in various corners of the internet for simply existing. Some have already oddly condemned it as U.S. military propaganda, sight unseen. Others will soon call it leftist or anti-war. But it’s not really either. It is content with setting up base camp in an indifferent center, as aware as likely any veteran of how their experience, then and now, is politicized and turned into spin, cashed in on at our culture clash casino where the door is always open.

Truthfully, Warfare deliberately offers little in the way of a point-of-view. It avoids any words like “WMDs” or “oil” or “Bush,” just as it notably never once shows a single insurgent fall from a bullet wound or “show of force” blast from the air above. This is not the jingoistic hero-worship of Clint Eastwood nor a Kathryn Bigelow lament. Yet like the Iraq War writ large, it is impossible to not ask what all this suffering was for, an open question that Warfare‘s recalcitrance to say anything about still ultimately speaks volumes. When the Iraqi home this movie occurs in is absolutely obliterated, the mother of a terrified family hiding beneath their furniture cries perhaps the only word of English she knows: Why?

Garland and Mendoza are content on not answering what probably can never be satisfactorily explained. That will frustrate some viewers, but then so did the war.

More problematic may be the film’s absolute commitment to near anonymity of its soldiers. Again, if you cannot spot Poulter, Melton, or Connor in a lineup, you’ll be unlikely to tell many of them apart. It is this documentarian-like element which will probably prevent Warfare from having the cultural impact of a movie like Black Hawk Down or The Hurt Locker, or sure, pure propaganda like American Sniper. Warfare is not a story or narrative in the traditional sense, it is a 90-minute assault on the senses. It leaves you to make head or tails of what it all meant, which is a bold choice but artistically not as satisfying as the great war movies. Its subjectivity is so acute that it obscures what should have been a stronger emotional response.

Still, I cannot fully dismiss Warfare‘s effect as limited or fleeting. In fact, it reminds me a great deal of the second wave of Vietnam War films that began cropping up in the 1980s. There was the initial salvo, a series of movies that ran the gamut from classics (Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter) to the movies that were decidedly not (The Green Berets). But they were all films by filmmakers of a different generation and with a different set of values they were infusing into the Southeast Asian jungles. Then came Oliver Stone’s Platoon and Born on the Fourth of July, or even Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, which was based on real-life marine and later Vietnam War correspondent Gustav Hasford’s experiences.

Warfare presents an immediate snapshot of a hellish moment of agony in a handful of lives. It’s brief, constrictive, and still impossible to look away from because you can track its honesty in a second.

Warfare opens on April 11.

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