War is hell, and that certainly is shown viscerally in this 95-minute feature. If only it did more than that.
“Warfare,” directed and penned by Alex Garland, is based on the account of U.S. Navy Seal Ray Mendoza, who shared his story as a co-writer. The movie is more or less a bottle film. There are a few overhead shots from the perspective of military aircraft and a few scenes set on roads nearby, but the great majority of “Warfare” is in a single house.
It’s 2006, and the U.S. military is engaged in the Battle of Ramadi during the Iraq War. The film centers on a group of Navy SEALS who have set themselves up in an Iraqi home to monitor activity across the street. Unfortunately, they’re soon found out and are quickly pinned down by a large group of Iraqi fighters and have to survive until they can be evacuated.
Garland’s “Warfare” is almost purely a combat film, not touching on any of the bigger implications of the Iraq War. In that sense, the director succeeds in crafting a truly apolitical film about a war that had plenty of politics, and focuses only on what soldiers went through on the battlefield.
Garland and his crew did a ton of work to make this as realistic as possible, from the sound work to the makeup and costume design. It’s a crystal-clear look at fights in the heart of Iraq which is harrowing… until it isn’t. In stripping “Warfare” from any deeper meaning or even tangible character development, it becomes less compelling the longer it goes on.
Wounded soldiers yell while bullets wiz by and explosions happen outside. The chaos is indeed captured, but there’s simply not much else here. Had this been a short film, where the intense combat is illustrated in a small span and delivered in an efficient manner, it could have worked. But even at 95 minutes, this movie feels too long with not much to offer.
It’s a shame because both the Iraq War, and the 20-year War in Afghanistan for the matter, have resulted good movies that explore both the conflicts overseas and the impact back home. In fact, they’ve been coming out steadily since the 2000s.
Some examples include 2008’s “The Hurt Locker,” 2009’s “Brothers,” 2010’s “Green Zone,” 2012’s “Zero Dark Thirty,” 2013’s “Lone Survivor,” 2014’s “American Sniper,” 2017’s “Last Flag Flying,” 2020’s “The Outpost” and 2021’s “The Mauritanian,” as well as “Official Secrets” and “The Report,” both from 2019.
Whether they contain combat or not, these films all provide more insight into the impacts of these wars for soldiers and civilians alike. “Warfare,” meanwhile, despite being exceptionally well-crafted technically, simply offers little in terms of character, narrative or political intrigue to become engrossing.
Of course, it can be difficult to establish a full story and complete character arcs in a movie centered on a single-battle, as it’s meant to simply reenact what these soldiers went through. However, even that notion has been done better in the likes of 2001’s “Black Hawk Down” and 2017’s “Dunkirk.”
Each of those two films display the desperation of those situations and how the events around them were impacting the characters in real time. Viewers get just a fraction of that in “Warfare.”
As previously mentioned, the film looks and sounds great, plus the cast is really committed to the dramatization. However, it loses a person as time goes on as nothing deeper is provided to the viewer. Plus, the end credits show several blurred faces of the real soldiers, meaning they didn’t want to be involved in the project, which gives off a weird feeling leaving the auditorium. 2.35 out of 5.
Matthew Liedke on Film 
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