Why 'Warfare' is the most realistic war movie ever made
Intense, no frills, blunt force trauma filmmaking at its finest.
War separates all the little rules and worries that civilians constantly stress over daily. It’s like shaking all the loose change out of your pockets to find your keys. It cuts all the fat away from the bone and isolates the mission at hand: to survive and see another day while keeping the person next to you in one piece. Instead of getting the groceries from the truck to the front door, it’s picking up a severely injured soldier and getting him to the safe zone of the vehicle outside without taking more enemy fire. An army of one becomes a team of strangers thrown together with a single purpose.
In a life-or-death situation, the intensity doesn’t allow our brains to focus on anything less important than survival. For a group of Navy Seals back in 2006, during the deadliest battle of the war in Iraq, that was the mission: Shoot your way out of a house and into the transport vehicle waiting outside with enemies raining down fire from multiple directions on an open street.
One could say that co-directors Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s new film, Warfare, cuts the fat from regular war movie filmmaking. No extra hyperbole or fluff is added to make us care extra about the men in this unit. The human element is always present amongst the frailty of a war zone. All we see are the facts left in the memory of Mendoza, one of the Navy Seals under fire that fateful day. Everything the audience experiences in the movie, all 95 minutes, is based on Mendoza’s experiences.
They were posted there to keep overwatch on U.S. soldiers on the ground, but were spotted by locals and eventually smoked out of the building by explosives and gunfire. What starts as a comforting brotherhood gathering around an entertaining workout video, Garland knows how to throw us off early on with light camaraderie, eventually boils down into one long standoff and escape.
The co-directors take their time, though. A movie with a tight runtime that doesn’t seem to rush is excellent. You don’t hear guns or noise for at least 20 minutes, as we get to know the men just enough to worry about their safety later on. Instead of classic cinema tropes clogging up the scenes, we meet them as a bunch of horny young guys who don’t mind killing time watching a woman perform exercises in a class before death comes looking for them. It’s like taking them back to their teenage days for a brief period, which could be only a handful of years for some.
The cast is populated with faces you might know and names you almost recognize. Charles Melton isn’t wooing a woman; he’s ordering a nearby tank to blow out the second floor of a building he’s still trapped inside. Will Poulter was Adam Warlock in the Guardians of the Galaxy: Vol. 3 and the chef who helped Marcus unlock his baking talents in London on The Bear, but here he’s a hard-nosed soldier who finds his young mind thrown into an everlasting daze when explosives blow out his train of thought. You may remember Joseph Quinn as the rock star from the last season of Stranger Things and the noble soul who helped Lupita Nyong’o with her cat in the last A Quiet Place movie, but he’s a head-shaven Navy SEAL who finds his life and health turned upside down in an instant.
Michael Gandolfini may look like the young actor who portrayed his late father’s classic role in a Sopranos movie, but here he’s someone who needs to carry his buddy to safety because his legs are shredded by shrapnel. Cosmo Jarvis may have the coolest name in the cast and stoke a few indie films, but he’s why this movie exists. He plays Elliott, the Navy SEAL who has zero memory of the event, which is why Mendoza teamed up with Garland to make the film. Everything we see here is based on actual memory.
Garland and Mendoza are a dream team for a war movie. The former, who directed the brutally realistic Civil War, brings his viscerally realistic skillset to a true story with a guy who stresses authenticity. A great filmmaker with a real-life Navy Seal allows for a blunt experience that breathes air into the idea of directorial collaborations. Mendoza, portrayed vividly by newcomer D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, co-wrote the screenplay with Garland.
In order to be appropriately executed, Warfare needed this team. Without it, Hollywood would have screwed it up. To get these tales right, only one or two people can pull it off.
It’s not just a great war movie; Warfare is the most realistic war movie ever made, sitting next to Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down in its directness. Don’t miss it in theaters this weekend.