Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland snuck a violent, harrowing anti-war film into their big budget Iraq War epic.
Warning: Spoilers for WARFARE below.
It has all the dressings of a patriotic classic; a story about military bravery against the odds, a cast that looks like the cover of “Tiger Beat”, a director who he himself was a Navy SEAL, and the film based on his real life experiences. On paper, this sounds like a film built in a lab for the “Red, White, & Blue; these colors don’t run” crowd.
So, it was with great, traumatic surprise that director’s Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza had actually created one of the most visceral and upsetting anti-war films of all time.
Taking place in near real time over a day in Ramadi, Iraq in 2006, WARFARE follows a group of Navy SEALS as they are attacked, and subsequently evacuated, from a small home. In the short time that they are there, they are bombed, shot at, injured to a gruesome degree, and left broken in the back of retreating rolling armor.
The first half hour or so is a lead up to this attack. We watch this group of SEALs, played by actual a cadre of up-and-coming young men men (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn, Michael Gandolfini, and Patrick Melton, to name a few), as they survey a target from a home they have “commandeered”. Quickly, it becomes clear that they’ve been spotted, as they start to watch men in the distance group up in preparation for attack. The SEALs remain calm, radioing back and forth with command in a bored monotone, not really viewing the amassed men as a threat, believing they hold the superiority, both in fire power and will.
But, after a grenade is dropped into their snipers nest, they find themselves rattled. The calls become a bit more frantic as they call for armored support, and try to secure their air support back. Men dash between rooms, trying to source the rest of their missing gear, while the injured sniper (Cosmos Jarvis) tries to regain his bearings.
But still, they remain focused, knowing what their objective is, even if they start to become frustrated with one another, snapping at each other over missing equipment and at the translators for not understanding them.
But, then, the armored support arrives, and normalcy, even violent normalcy, seems to be near.
Then, in a theater-shaking shock of sound, an IED goes off, and WARFARE becomes a horror film.
Men lie in pieces in the streets, their humanity stripped into ground meat and dead eyes. Those that have survived scream into the enveloping dust; not for retribution or out of defiance, but in utter and horrifying pain, terrified and confused.
While WARFARE in its 1st act is about the boredom that can accompany war (the constant waiting, the chain of command slow down on orders, the inventory checking) the 2nd and 3rd act is about the absolute terror of actual combat. The SEALs are dropped into constant gunfire mere moments after the IED goes off, as they attempt to retreat both themselves and their wounded back into the home. From there, the soundscape of WARFARE is pure hell; it is just the constant pings and blasts of bullets hitting the side of the house, the confused and desperate calls into command for any kind of support, and the stomach churning screams of agony from the wounded.
There is nothing romantic, nothing cool, about this battle. No scenes of tactical gunfights or military hardware doing massive damage. The shooting is done sporadically, chaotically, machine gun fire blasted into the side of a wall, suppressing fire just to keep the bullets from the other side from coming for a few seconds. Even the big hardware, the “show of force”, is nothing more than a low level fly over, kicking up dust and causing a sonic boom. It is used consistently throughout the film, to no real effect; the bullets come flying a few seconds later.
Garland hasn’t forgotten his genre roots, though. The constant tension, the constant fighting feels like something out of a nihilistic siege film. The two films I kept coming back to in my mind as I watched were Assault On Precinct 13, as we watch faceless enemies blasting away, with nothing for those inside to do to stop it, and Texas Chain Saw Massacre, as we watch a group of “normal” people (normal in the sense that they are normal for a battlefield) get dropped into a meat grinder that starts to unravel their psyche the longer it goes.
There are no heroes in WARFARE either. In almost all “anti-war” war films, they still portray the soldiers as stalwart men, willing to lay down their lives for their brothers in arms, still following a romantic ideal we have about war and those that fight it.
This is not the men of WARFARE. Once the battle begins, they all begin to unravel. Some quickly, such as those in shock, such as Ray (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), who keeps coming in and out of shock while administering pressure on a wound, nearly killing the soldier in the process. For others, it comes on slow, like Erik (Will Poulter), the commander of the team, who begins to realize that he is unraveling as the fight goes on, no longer in a headspace to lead, finding himself sitting on a bed, completely lost. Even when one SEAL attempts to muster their spirits, shouting “we’re frogmen; act like it!”, he is quickly shouted down by the frustrated and scared majority, none of them wanting to hear it.
By films end, another group of armored carriers arrive at the house, and under orders, begin shelling all the nearby homes. It is indiscriminate destruction, blind firing in the hopes that they can get a few seconds to run to safety. In a mad dash, they sprint for the carriers, the doors closing behind them, as they are wheeled out of the battle zone, leaving the road quiet once again.
What was it all for? The mission the SEALs are on is never specified, and they take no progressive steps towards anything. They watch as an angry mob forms around them, nothing else. The home they occupy? Stolen in the night, broken into with a sledgehammers and the families held at gunpoint. What did they achieve? Nothing, beyond survival.
While many have painted this as a film that says “nothing”, what it actually illustrates is the fact that the war in Iraq was literally about “nothing”; the mission these men were on meant nothing, the deaths that occurred meant nothing, and the resources used to pull them out of their situation meant nothing.
This is not a story of heroes, or of bravery against adversity. This is a story of a group of (highly trained) kids, losing their minds in the desert as they try to navigate constant gunfire and the sounds of their wounded crying and screaming in the next room while they hold their shredded limbs.
Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland crafted a film about what war actually is; monotony, boredom and terror. And we sent thousands of our youth, men and women, into the desert to experience that, with many never getting to experience anything after that terror.
WARFARE is true warfare, in all its ugliness and cruelty and pointlessness.
