The second chapter of what I’m tempted to call Alex Garland’s “American Typewriter” series, “Warfare” plays like a concentrated B-side to last year’s sprawling “Civil War,” which leveraged the aforementioned font to lend an air of objective reportage to a fictional story about photojournalists covering the downfall of Western democracy. From a distance, that font might seem to be the only thing these two films share in common besides their director (and his signature ambivalence), as one is a provocatively speculative epic that ends with a ground assault on the White House, and the other is a violently grounded simulation that aspires to be the most realistic movie ever made about modern combat. Where “Civil War” was born from anxieties, “Warfare” is based on memories — specifically, the memories of a Ramadi surveillance mission that went sideways for a group of Navy SEALs during the Iraq War in 2006.
And yet, for all of their overlying differences, both of these projects are defined by a shared effort to fill in the deadliest blind spots of American exceptionalism (a strange and/or charitable task for a British filmmaker like Garland to undertake, depending on your POV). If “Civil War” was a mealymouthed broadside against the idea that “it can’t happen here,” “Warfare” is a viscerally hyper-specific reminder of the human cost required to ensure that “it” keeps happening everywhere else instead.
Less irresolute than Garland’s previous feature but likewise determined to remain superficially apolitical in spite of itself, “Warfare” ignores the partisan implications of “supporting the troops” in favor of trying to reconcile the fantasy of serving this country with the reality of dying for it. The only thing harder for Americans to fathom than a fake war our own soil, it would seem, is one of the real wars that have been waged in our name somewhere else; wars fought so far away that the people we send to fight them — impossibly young and impressively capable — are reduced to abstractions by hawks and doves alike.
Garland has long been fascinated by failures of the human imagination, and the sole purpose of this 93-minute immersion test is to bring the unvarnished truth of what those SEALs experienced in Ramadi closer to home. To make it real for the rest of us; as inescapable as a bad memory or the sight lines of an IMAX screen. In order to accomplish that goal, Garland has done his best to strip “Warfare” of any imagination altogether.
Conceived with/co-directed by former communications officer and “Civil War” stunt coordinator Ray Mendoza, who’s played here by “Reservation Dogs” star D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai, “Warfare” is absent most legible forms of editorialization. The film unfolds in something akin to real-time, its screenplay — collated from and corroborated by the memories of the soldiers who survived the ordeal — determined to feel more like a transcript of events than the blueprint for a Hollywood film.
Instead of dialogue, the SEAL team communicates through chatter. Instead of characters, the cast is identified by rank and responsibility (the only things that make it even remotely possible to distinguish between Garland’s all-star team of pasty young hunks, most of whom look exactly like Tom Blyth even though none of them are). Instead of drama, the film’s considerable tension is sustained by the specter of death. There are no cheap thrills here. No well-calibrated jolts or “cool” set-ups. It’s all about dry verisimilitude (at least until Garland starts to lean a little too hard on the I.E.D. sound effects), which in this case proves more than compelling enough.
On its face, that may not seem to be a novel approach to a war film, but Garland and Mendoza’s relentless pursuit of military “realism” is uniquely weaponized by their refusal to comment on its meaning. One could argue that “Warfare” takes a fetishistic pleasure in detailing the competence displayed by these young men, in studying the camaraderie that binds them together, and in illustrating the occupational might they bring to bear upon the insurgents they’ve been assigned to monitor so that American troops could safely pass through the area. If you’re selectively looking for propaganda, as either a critic or a consumer, “Warfare” gives you plenty of material to piece into an argument; while there isn’t a millisecond of this movie that made “serving our country” seem like a fun or noble pursuit to me, I’m also stuck on the fact that even such a pointedly apolitical project would be impossible to finance or advertise if told from the Iraqi POV.
But Garland and Mendoza’s film devotes the same unflinching attention to how brusquely Mendoza’s unit displaces — and terrorizes — the Iraqi family whose house they commandeer, just as it similarly fixates on how Will Poulter’s Officer in Charge starts to lose his nerve after shit hits the fan, and on the carnage that an enemy I.E.D. inflicts upon the members of his unit (in a movie without a score, Kit Connor’s screams become a soundtrack unto themselves).
This, Garland seems intent on reminding his audience, is what America “winning” a war looks like: brave and brilliant children getting blown to bits without anything to show for it. This is what he wants people to have in their minds’ eye before they send their sons to fight the next one, and what he fears they’ve forgotten in the years since this country last put boots on the ground. After all, forgetting is a failure of the imagination unto itself, and even some of the SEALs who were in Ramadi that day have struggled to remember what the experience was like. That’s especially true of medic and sniper Elliot Miller, played here by an unrecognizable Cosmo Jarvis, whose rifle scope doubles as a lens onto the past.
Garland is always loath to put his thumb on the scale, and the same ambivalence that made his sci-fi efforts so involving continues to sand the edges off his more grounded stories of disintegration, but “Warfare” at least has something to gain from the confusion that made “Civil War” such a headache (which is to say, the confusion of “why the fuck did he want to make this?”). Much as the concussive sound design, abject lack of context, and indistinguishable casting might suggest that a similar film could have been made about any number of firefights, Garland’s forensic attention to the minutiae of what happened proves unexpectedly personal by the end.
When did the guy played by Michael Gandolfini get up to pee? Who doubled back to get the gear he left in the bedroom after someone threw a grenade through Elliot’s sniper hole? How many times did Mendoza call for an evac before Charles Melton finally showed up like Captain America? “Warfare” is pulled tight by the sheer weight of these details, and by the tug-of-war they inspire between the humanization and dehumanization of the film’s characters.
The privilege of that tension isn’t extended to the Iraqi insurgents who are trying to kill them, but they similarly benefit from Garland’s commitment to a manufactured reality — from the observational approach that’s allowed by his use of 360-degree sets and improvised camerawork. Just as we see the American soldiers yawn and sigh and scratch their heads before all hell breaks loose, the people of Ramadi move through the film’s convincing London set with a naturalism that only seems like a threat by virtue of the fact that we’re seeing it through the scope of Miller’s sniper rifle. If not for that, they would simply appear to be going about their lives (an impression underlined by a memorable beat at the end of the film, when the Iraqi soldiers tentatively step back onto the main street of their town after the American forces have fled).
“Warfare” makes no overt effort to empathize with the nameless men who are firing at Mendoza and his friends from across the street (or to do much of anything else), and even the Iraqi scouts working alongside the SEALs are treated like second-class citizens, but all of the people on both sides of this skirmish are bound together by the film’s overwhelming sense of waste, which proves far more impactful than its assaultive pyrotechnics and Dolby spectacle. Any conversation about the waste of the Iraq War has to begin with the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi people whose lives were forfeited in the name of George W. Bush’s foreign policy, but Garland prefers to explore it through the pageantry and protocol of the world’s greatest war machine — all of that training, all of that money, and all of that human potential wasted on a show of force as empty as the fighter jet fly-bys that Mendoza repeatedly calls in to provide his unit some cover.
That “Warfare” feels like another waste of Garland’s abilities as a storyteller only adds to the collective shame of such misplaced energy. It’s difficult to discern exactly what Garland and Mendoza intended with “Warfare,” and that task might seem to be made exponentially more difficult by their very unexpected decision to pepper the end credits with upbeat footage from the making of the movie. Over the past few weeks, however, I’ve come to feel as if that strange coda — in which we see the real soldiers visit the actors playing them on set — might be the most instructive part of the film, even if only by default.
The film is a clear love letter to Elliot Miller and the other men in Mendoza’s unit, but the verisimilitude with which it recreates the worst day of their lives — when measured against the ambiguity as to what it hopes to achieve by doing so — ultimately makes “Warfare” seem like a natural evolution of Garland’s previous work, so much of which has hinged on the belief that our history as a species (and, more recently, America’s self-image as a country) is shaped by the limits of our imagination.
To watch the behind-the-scenes footage at the end of his latest film, and to see the blue screens blot out the English hills that stretch beyond the film’s sets, is to be reminded that even the most realistic depictions of modern warfare can never hope to capture the experience of living through it. It’s also to be reminded that, in this case, the people who’ve lived through that experience are some of the same people who are trying so hard to recreate it for our benefit on screen (and possibly for their own as well).
“Warfare” is a film that wants to be felt more than interpreted, but it doesn’t make any sense to me as an invitation — only as a warning created from the wounds of a memory.
Grade: B-
A24 will release “Warfare” in theaters on Friday, April 11.
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