Producers: Andrew Macdonald, Allon Reich, Matthew Penry-Davey and Peter Rice Directors: Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland Screenplay: Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland Cast: D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Finn Bennett, Taylor John Smith, Michael Gandolfini, Adain Bradley, Noah Centineo, Aaron Mackenzie, Evan Holtzman, Henrique Zaga, Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton, Alex Brockdorff, Joe Macaulay, Laurie Duncan, Jake Lampert, Aaron Deakins, Tom Dunne, Donya Hussen, Heider Ali, Rayhan Ali, Nathan Altai, Aso Sherabayani, Amira Dutton and Inbal Amram Distributor: A24
Grade: B+
General William Tecumseh Sherman famously declared that war is hell, and writer-director Alex Garland seems intent on demonstrating that onscreen. His previous film “Civil War” included sequences of grisly power in depicting military conflict in a politically fractured America, and now he teams with Ray Mendoza, a veteran of the Iraq War, to fashion a harrowing recreation of a single failed mission in that U.S. Middle East intervention.
The result is an extremely frustrating film. On the one hand, it’s extraordinarily well-crafted and possesses undeniable visceral power. On the other, it’s an isolated snapshot that lacks context and a broader perspective. Moreover, it’s attempting something that’s frankly beyond cinema’s reach.
The incident depicted occurred in the Second Battle of Ramadi in November, 2006, as part of a wider operation to purge the city in central Iraq of Al-Quaeda-affiliated insurgents. Navy SEAL team Alpha One is briefly introduced among a bunch of comrades reacting with wild whoops to a sexy dance video. Soon they’re quietly moving down the street of an unnamed city until one of them, presumably team lead sniper Elliot (Cosmo Jarvis) selects a house, which they enter and commandeer, placing the terrified family, woken from their sleep, under the watchful gaze of two Iraqi interpreters. They punch a hole in a second-story wall through which Elliot points the muzzle of his rifle, not to fire but to use the scope to monitor the crossroads below.
The platoon settles in for what’s clearly a reconnaissance mission. Elliot mans the scope except when he needs a break; then Frank (Taylor John Smith) spells him. Commanding officer Erik (Will Poulter) is first among equals, while Ray (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, playing writer-director Mendoza), the communications man, scribbles information while maintaining contact with other units and the more distant control hub.
For a while all is quiet as the surveillance continues and Elliot notes increasing foot traffic in the square. Then a grenade is suddenly lobbed through the sniper hole; Elliot is injured and medic Sam (Joseph Quinn) attempts to tend to his wounds while Ray calls in a request for a Bradley to evacuate them. When it arrives and the men attempt to board it under cover of a smoke canister, however, an IED explodes, further injuring Elliot and Sam as well. The Bradley flees, and the men rush back into the house, now under full attack from the surrounding rooftops. They call for a “show of force,” a low jet fly-over that rocks the neighborhood and raises a cloud of dust.
As Ray and Macdonald (Michael Gandolfini) do their best to treat the wounded with morphine over their screams of pain, Erik requests Alpha Two, operating nearby, to come to their aid. Under command of Jake (Charles Melton) they respond, though their progress is delayed by insurgent fire. Finally they arrive, and when the Bradley crews resist returning because of the enemy fire, Jake persuades John (Finn Bennett), his com man, to impersonate the operation commander and order them to redeploy. The vehicles eventually arrive, wounded and survivors scramble aboard and all depart, leaving locals and insurgents to take charge of the streets.
As fashioned by Mendoza, Garland, the technical crew and the cast, “Warfare” might be categorized as a docu-drama, but one hewing to a verisimilitude that borders on the fanatical. Mendoza’s screenplay is derived solely from his memories and those of the other squad members—there are no big speeches or exhibitions of Hollywood-style bonhomie, just the clipped conversational jargon of professionals going about their jobs turned urgent in an increasingly desperate situation. The Ramadi setting has been recreated in England with remarkable precision by production designer Mark Digby, art directors Charlie Meakin and Declan O’Brien and costumers David Crossman and Neil Murphy, in much the same fashion as Stanley Kubrick did Vietnam in “Full Metal Jacket.” The supple camerawork of David J. Thompson and editing of Fin Oates capture both the near-blasé atmosphere of the first thirty minutes and the fraught intensity of the final sixty. The special effects team led by Ryan Conder and visual effects contingent under Simon Stanley-Clamp insert their work seamlessly into the live-action footage. The makeup and prosthetic work is also outstanding. And one mustn’t overlook the superb sound design by Glenn Freemantle, which makes the aural ambiance as vital as the visual one. Taken as a whole, this is one of the most realistic depictions of combat ever achieved in a film that isn’t pure documentary.
Adding to the impact, every member of the cast is fully committed, and none showboats. Actors playing the SEALS squad went through a sort of boot camp to build a sense of camaraderie, and it shows. One can see the characters’ fierce devotion to one another.
Yet in the end the film is unable to do what it aims for—to invest this single episode with the weight of representing “war” in general, and to “immerse” viewers in its horror. To be sure, it scrubs the smug paeans to courage under fire and medal-worthy heroics so typical of “patriotic” films from its portrayal of a bloody, brutal incident without in any way demeaning the bravery of the men involved. But other films have done that, and none has captured the “essence” of combat. All a film can do is depict particulars as accurately as possible, as “Warfare” does in this specific instance with painstaking fidelity.
But it must be admitted that in isolating what happened to SEAL team Alpha One in November, 2006, so completely from the larger context of the Iraq effort “Warfare” fails to put it into perspective. It was, after all, a single episode in a conflict begun under problematic circumstances—inaccurate intelligence and erroneous political claims—and conducted in often dubious ways. The script presumes viewers know all this, but such a presumption, in an age when ignorance about even current events is rampant, is dangerous. And what of the larger details surrounding the mission itself? What was its purpose? (To prepare the way for an entrance by ground troops, though that’s not made clear here.) Why was there no detailed extraction plan if things went wrong? Why were these men left effectively to fend for themselves by the command structure? Presenting this story in a vacuum doesn’t do those who lived through it, or those of us viewing the film, justice.
Nor can any film be truly immersive. As much as filmmakers might like to put us inside their narrative, they can’t; we’re still always observers, and always detached observers, however emotionally invested in characters on screen as we might become. In this case, we can empathize with the men thrown into such dire circumstances, but we can’t actually experience what they did—especially since we can’t share the remarkable camaraderie that develops over a time of service in a military squad. We share time with them for only ninety wrenching minutes, after all, not the months or years they’ve spent together.
But concentrating overmuch on what “Warfare” doesn’t or can’t do shouldn’t blind us to what it does, and does well. It’s an uncompromising recreation of one ghastly incident in which American soldiers were put in harm’s way without due consideration of the possible consequences. One breathes a sigh of relief that in this case they were extricated, even if tragically bloodied. One is left to wonder, looking at the situation in Iraq today, whether their sacrifice, and that of so many who didn’t escape with their lives, was worth it.