The highest praise I can offer “Warfare,” a tough, relentless movie about life and death in battle, is that it isn’t thrilling. It is, rather, a purposely sad, angry movie, and as much a lament as a warning. That’s to the point of this factually informed fiction, which tracks a platoon of U.S. Navy SEALs during a calamitous mission in Iraq. There, under cover of an otherwise still night, the troops take over a seemingly ordinary home, place the inhabitants under guard and stake out the area. Then the men watch and wait while sitting, standing and sometimes agitatedly peering out windows in the name of a cause that no one ever explains outright.
Among those not explaining any of this — the mission, its averred rationale and its carnage — are the writers-directors Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza. Garland’s last movie was “Civil War” (2024), an eerie, uncomfortably realistic slice of speculative fiction set in a war-torn United States that Mendoza, a former member of the SEALs, worked on as the military adviser. That experience led to a friendship and now to “Warfare,” which is based on a real operation in 2006 that Mendoza took part in; at the time, the Americans were attempting to take control of Ramadi, the capital of Anbar Province. The war was three years old by then, an estimated 600,000 Iraqis were dead and American fatalities would soon reach 3,000.
Much of “Warfare” takes place in real time inside a blocky, two-story building where the inhabitants, including several children, are sleeping when the Americans enter. Crowded into a bedroom where they’re watched over by a rotation of guards, the Iraqis aren’t named (not that I remember, at least) and are scarcely individualized. The military men are more distinct, largely because they’re either played by somewhat familiar faces — including Will Poulter, as Captain Erik, the head of the initial operation — or have distinguishing features, like the mustache on Elliott (Cosmo Jarvis), the head sniper. (The movie is dedicated to the real Elliott Miller, who somehow survived the operation.)
Garland is very good at building suspense, and he’s especially adept at turning quiet spaces into unrelenting zones of dread. “Warfare” opens with a burst of raucous silliness as uniformed men crowded around a monitor in a small room watch a risibly tacky music video for the dance tune “Call on Me.” Set in what’s meant to be an aerobics studio circa the 1980s, the video features a throng of big-haired, tight-thighed hotties (and one pitiful dude), stretching and pumping as if warming up for an orgiastic marathon. It’s a spectacle that the guys watch with collective pleasure and much whooping, and which underscores that you’ve entered a specific world of men that, minutes later, goes spookily quiet in an unnamed town.
The SEAL unit takes over the Iraqi house quickly, breaking through a bricked-off upper floor, where most of them position themselves. In one room, Elliott, eyes squinting and face slicked with sweat, lies on his belly on a makeshift platform watching the street through a large, jagged peephole punched in the wall. As the minutes tick off, the men continue waiting as they listen to radio commands and watch surveillance footage. Every so often, Elliott scribbles a note as does a second sniper, Frank (Taylor John Smith). Frank briefly takes over when Elliott needs a break to replace his chewing tobacco and to relieve himself, which he does by urinating in an empty water bottle, something that I doubt that John Wayne did.
The nadir of Wayne’s career was “The Green Berets” (1968), a jingoistic war movie set in Vietnam that Renata Adler, in a review for The New York Times, memorably took down as “so unspeakable, so stupid, so rotten and false” that, she argued, it was an invitation to grieve “what has happened to the fantasy-making apparatus in this country.” Over the next half-century, that apparatus continued to chug and sometimes cruise along while releasing fewer kinds of movies. The year that “The Green Berets” opened, the studios still offered real genre variety, including musicals. These days it can seem like the only multiplex choice is some kind of war movie populated with combatants wearing superhero tights, cop uniforms, whatever.
American moviemakers have become so very good at making war — a talent that digital effects have only intensified — that it can seem like every new release is another occasion to enjoy death and destruction. As counterintuitive as it seems, Garland and Mendoza push against that tendency with “Warfare,” primarily by sucking the putative fun out of watching some characters shoot and kill others. That’s more difficult than perhaps it sounds in part because violence seems almost naturally cinematic. At least that’s how it can feel after more than a century of westerns, adventures, gangster films, detective stories, superhero flicks and so on, whether they feature bloodless bloodletting or artfully lit and shot arterial sprays.
The performances in “Warfare” are uniformly persuasive and restrained, except when wounded men scream in pain, which they do: At least one dies, and others are hideously wounded. But there is no admirably staged bloodshed in “Warfare,” no award-worthy soliloquies. Instead, there is fighting and more fighting, explosions, smoke and chaos, and a deep, underlying seriousness that can feel rare in contemporary American movies. At one point, a woman shrieks “Why?,” which is finally the only question that seems worth asking when those in power send other people’s children off to die. I think that Garland and Mendoza are asking it, too. I doubt that John Wayne would like “Warfare,” which is also high praise.
Warfare
Rated R for intense, at times graphic violence. Running time: 1 hour 35 minutes. In theaters.
Manohla Dargis is the chief film critic for The Times.
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