Even if you haven’t seen Warfare, you might have come across news headlines calling it “the most realistic war film ever made.” This isn’t a cheap marketing ploy. The film, the latest from Ex Machina, Annihilation, and Civil War director Alex Garland, does indeed have a strong claim to that title.
Garland’s first foray into cinematic nonfiction, Warfare is based on the memories of Navy SEAL soldiers who were ambushed by al-Qaida in the aftermath of the Battle of Ramadi in 2006. Garland’s co-director, Ray Mendoza, was one of those soldiers. After the Iraq War, Mendoza became a military consultant for films such as Lone Survivor, as well as the Call of Duty video game series. He also advised Garland’s previous film, Civil War, about a hypothetical conflict in tomorrow’s United States.
While many war films take inspiration from true stories, the scripts themselves don’t always stay entirely truthful in the telling, embellishing their source material with excessive amounts of cinematic heroism, heartbreak, and moral preaching. Not Warfare. The film was conceived as an attempt to present the experiences of Mendoza and his brothers-in-arms as accurately as possible. Nothing more. Nothing less.
In Warfare, every element of filmmaking, from the screenplay and direction to acting and sound design, works in tandem toward this goal. Most of the film is set in real time and takes place in a single location: the civilian home where Mendoza’s platoon barricaded itself. The sounds of rifles, grenades, and fighter jets flying overhead are even more deafening than the sonics of Christopher Nolan’s Dunkirk. Louder still are the agonizing screams of soldiers who have been struck by an improvised explosive device that leaves their legs a broken, burnt, bloodied mess.
Warfare gets high marks for craft. This is to be expected of Garland, whose technical prowess as a filmmaker has been on full display ever since Ex Machina hit theatres a decade ago. On this front, his latest has a lot in common with his first. Both take place in confined spaces, with a limited cast of characters, focusing on a singular concept.
In contrast, assessing the film’s merit on a thematic level is less straightforward. In this regard, Warfare takes after Civil War, which was likewise praised for its craft, but criticized for failing to meaningfully engage with political aspects of its plot. Garland and Mendoza may well have created “the most realistic war film” of all time, but another, more important question remains: does it endorse war, or oppose it? It’s a difficult one to answer, not least because every film theorist has their own definition of what makes or breaks an anti-war film. French filmmaker François Truffaut is said to have argued that there is no such thing as an anti-war film, a statement seemingly affirmed by the fact that several films that are widely regarded as anti-war went on to leave a pro-war impact on large parts of their audiences.
Take Stanley Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket, for example. While critics have waxed poetic about the way the film depicts the dehumanization of soldiers by way of the military industrial complex, it also — for the same, paradoxical reason — inspired many American men to enlist. For example, in 2018, former U.S. marine Antony Swofford wrote: “Full Metal Jacket wasn’t the only reason I joined the Marine Corps, but it was a major one. The Gunny pointing his finger in a recruit’s face while shouting profanity, hurling insults at the recruits’ manhood and mothers and posing questions and insinuations about their sexuality indoctrinated us with the idea that coded racism, physical abuse and psychological hazing went hand in hand with becoming a man.”
Swofford argues Kubrick’s film resonated with him not because it criticized the futility and inhumanity of war, but because it showed that the army “could turn young, soft, irrelevant boys into the most lethal human killing machines in history.” These boys, he concludes, “believed that intimidation and humiliation were essential to the formation of their warrior selves. And drill instructors were happy to oblige.”
In this regard, Full Metal Jacket stands in contrast to Stalingrad-born director Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985), about a Byelorussian teenager who joins a partisan group fighting the Germans in World War II. Like Full Metal Jacket, Come and See explores the way war dehumanizes people. Unlike Kubrick’s film, however, its exploration of this subject leaves little room for alternative, positive interpretations. Both treat war as transformative, but in the latter, this transformation is not constructive, only corrosive, claiming the souls of civilians and soldiers alike, regardless of which side they’re on. If there is such a thing as an anti-war film, Come and See is it.
Where on this spectrum does Warfare end up? I’d argue Garland and Mendoza gravitate towards the side of Come and See. The aforementioned screams and gruesome leg injuries border on body horror and are disturbing to the point that they could dissuade some viewers from ever putting on a military uniform. These are not badges of honor to be shown off at neighborhood barbecues back home. They are wounds that leave physical and mental scars, if they don’t kill outright.
Warfare also deserves credit for deconstructing the image of the coldly efficient, hyperorganized killing machine presented in Full Metal Jacket and other Hollywood blockbusters. At the beginning of the film, Mendoza’s SEALs move like every other platoon we see on the big screen: disciplined and coordinated. Then the fighting starts. One setback leads to another, and the seemingly unbreakable chain of command snaps one link at a time.
Gunshots, explosions, flybys, radio messages, missing limbs, grown men begging for extra shots of morphine ensue and before long the situation has become so overwhelmingly chaotic that none of the soldiers know what to do, no matter how thorough their training or strong their willpower.
Unlike Civil War, which was praised for its production value but slammed for failing to meaningfully engage with the real-world political developments that underpin its premise, Warfare subtly investigates the real-world military culture that films such as Full Metal Jacket helped create. Warfare opens with the platoon ogling the women in Eric Prydz’s 2004 “Call on Me” music video. Before their operation goes south, they not-so-playfully bully one another, calling each other’s masculinity into question. The message communicated by these scenes echoes conclusions previously drawn by sociologists and historians of war. In the field, soldiers stand their ground not because they believe in the righteousness of their campaign — in this case, as in many others, there was none — but because they are afraid of looking weak in front of those around them.
All this subversion comes to a point in Warfare’s unceremonious ending of the narrative, which sees Mendoza’s platoon disappear into the bowels of two tanks as they are transported to safety. There is no sense of narrative closure, and Garland and Mendoza suggest that no hugs, epiphanies, or any of the other trappings of a traditional ending could make up for the carnage we have witnessed. Instead of closing on the SEALs, we end with one last look at what their presence has destroyed: the family whose home has been turned into rubble; the Iraqi men gathering in the street, rifles lowered, watching the tanks roll away. Why? What was it all for? Silence, then credits.
Indicative of the inconclusive discourse surrounding anti-war cinema, some are also arguing that Warfare skews closer to the pro-war messaging of Full Metal Jacket. Writing for Deadline, critic Gregory Nussen referred to the film as a “vacuous and perfidious advertisement for military recruitment.” Just as Kubrick’s portrayal of dehumanization struck some viewers as oddly inspiring, Nussen fears certain people may experience the chaos and violence in Warfare as exciting rather than terrifying. And sure enough, just after Mendoza’s entrapped platoon deconstructs the soldiers-as-efficient-killing-machines myth, a better organized (and, crucially, uninjured) party that eventually comes to their rescue arrives on the scene to build it back up. “I won’t be like them,” you can imagine the future soldier saying to himself, “I’ll be one of the other guys!”
While we’re at it, it’s also worth noting that Warfare fails to even so much as acknowledge the Iraq War’s historical and political context, including the fact that it was based on the pretext of finding weapons of mass destruction that didn’t exist. “In some ways,” Peter Bradshaw said in his review for The Guardian, the film is “almost fierce in its indifference” to this knowledge, which is a “resource that should be more readily available two decades on.” Although he concedes Warfare is “accurate in showing what the soldiers did, moment by moment,” he concludes Garland and Mendoza are “blandly unaware of a point or meaning beyond the horror.”
Ultimately, Warfare demonstrates both the potential of anti-war films and their shortcomings. As illustrated by Kubrick, even the most skilled and seasoned filmmakers cannot control the way audiences will interpret their work, as those interpretations are colored by different backgrounds, opinions, and experiences. Moreover, even the most harrowing films about war, by the very nature of film, risk trivializing the reality they seek to expose and condemn. There is a difference between directly suffering the life-altering consequences of war and watching someone else suffer those consequences on a screen, possibly while eating popcorn.
My feelings about Warfare are complicated. On the one hand, I don’t think any of these criticisms detract from the quality of its form — a work of art can be effective even if it does not meet certain extratextual, moral standards. On the other, I cannot in good conscience consider it in isolation from its real-world subject matter. As a critic, I admire Garland and Mendoza’s use of filmmaking tools. As a human being, though, I feel obligated to remind myself that what I am watching, however well constructed, is not the complete picture. It’s part of the picture, to be sure, but not the complete picture. It’s an accurate portrayal of a soldier’s experience of war that by the nature of its own conceit leaves out other, equally important aspects. No single film, no matter how thorough its commitment to accuracy, can fully encompass the gravity and consequences of armed conflict. Not Full Metal Jacket, not Come and See, not Warfare.
Tim Brinkhof is a U.S.-based Dutch journalist who writes about religion, politics, and history.
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