You don’t need me to tell you twice about the ugliness of war; young prosperous men and women alike sent to the front lines to snuff out lives or to have their own lives snuffed out so far from home – all for the ambitions of cornered or scheming geezers who, more often than not, use the cloak of patriotism to advance their personal motives. And for those who experience it firsthand, they’re almost lost in time, a slave to their memories and struggling to properly heal.
“Warfare” places us right on the battlefield to live through one such event and does the most in reminding us why there’s nothing so cruel as memory.
What happens when you pair together a director famous and infamous for blending the natural with the unnatural in a post-modernist approach with a former Navy Seal and Iraq war veteran more than likely plagued with severe PTSD? It’s a bittersweet bliss as Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza seem synchronized in a combined direction as empirical as they come, a precariously anchored dance of Garland's unsettling disparity and Mendoza's trench-born insights generates a purposely tedious piece that is as much about being lost in the war of memory as it is about war itself.
Peeling back and tearing down the layers of asphalt to this presentation brick by brick is almost too easy to carry out, for how skeletally and experimentally daring it stands out to and from other A24 projects; by jettisoning form and structure though, its style BECOMES the substance as every technical and aural element adapts to that crippling dichotomy of volatility to sell its own verisimilitude. That portrait gets tautly laid out in full with Mark Digby’s production design, one whose plainly rendered environments look lesser than the sum of its parts but while far from limited spatial confinement, the impeccable recreation succeeds at boxing in both the characters and audience alike within these claustrophobic confines.
And for such a relatively restricted area, the spacing is kept tight and strict with the sparsest of world-building sprinkled in to harken back to the real-life tragedy behind it.
Each meticulously composed frame from David J. Thompson's cinematography holds significant weight, crafting intensely evocative scenes placing us directly in the shoes of scrambled, wounded soldiers streaked with sweat and dirt with Fin Oate’s painstakingly relentless yet agile editing. And once more, the return of height scaling permeates the ever-enclosing framing of each shot, trapping us in a constant stop-start rhythmic pulley that the atmosphere capitalizes on after the first five minutes. The use of natural lighting and desaturated color palettes do add to the sense of chaos and confusion, costumes are closely adjacent to the time period, and the suffocating atmosphere is in a class of its own while the tone carries the nonchalant existential dread of a disquieting hush, nailing both the quiet buildup and the rubble-strewn aftermath. It goes without saying this film also masters both narrative and short-term suspense with its tension, often opting for the less showy, more effective ‘less is more’ approach to maximum effect.
And with the music score being nigh-nonexistent, the sound design has to carry the weight of that load; Glenn Freemantle manipulates every available sound in his disposal to use the way a weapon would to disorient, demoralize and overwhelm; it is arguably the heartbeat beneath this movie’s already shedded skin that never allows us an ounce of respite or catharsis.
The foray of action and violence we’re given here is nothing short of uncomfortable. Despite such prevalent aggression to be naturally cinematic, it’s given to us sparely and in moments where we don’t want it to occur and because it’s so casual and matter-of-fact, it hits us tenfold harder.
Each actor delivers a performance marked by deliberate restraint, their expressions subtly revealing the depth of their unshakable bond of comradeship and exuding distress, desperation and resilience shining in their determined stances. No single actor overshadows the others; instead, they merge seamlessly, presenting a unified front as a cohesive ensemble that captivates the audience with their unified presence.
Most war movies out there do either one of two things: glorify the national pride of battle, or focus on the heavy toll that conflict takes; given the context of this movie was set during the harrowing 2006 mission in Ramadi, Iraq, I knew which side of the equation I would be landing on…..and I still wasn’t mentally prepared for what I saw. If “Civil War” dissected journalism during wartime to pick apart the exploitative nature to those acts to where people aren’t any better than the senseless atrocities around them, this is plainly about the moment-to-moment visceral helplessness of soldiers caught in a helpless struggle for survival in a manner so objective, it merely feels abstract. Keep in mind: there’s no actual plot here. No characters or character development, no elaborate backstories, no romantic subplots, no macho-posturing, no broader context of the war itself, the focus isn’t even on pondering the moral justification for the U.S. invading Iraq in the first place; most of the usual staples of the cinematic experience have been sacrificed and surgically stripped away for the sake of complete immersion.
Said immersion does often feel like it’s insisting upon itself but that also means for how narrow its own focus is, it's not afraid to turn that critical eye on itself and interrogate its own motives.
Every so often, we get a film like this that tries to wage a war of its own against the glamorizing tendencies and readily digestible classical conventions of its genre and similar to “Civil War”, its intentions are to let the viewer pick apart their thoughts on ONLY the current situation in front of them without actively picking a side. Everyone makes a morally wrong decision here in the heat of the moment and while the emotional and psychological toll is just as palpable, it’s never overplayed. It lionizes the valor of everyone involved without resorting to any cliches or shoving any potential melodrama down our throats and the juxtaposition of reality and fantasy here in a film that’s almost nothing but madness is a sign that as much as we’ve been conditioned and neutered into applauding these endless bowels of death and destruction for centuries, any loss of life in war is a failure - of diplomacy, of leadership, of humanity. This film doesn't flinch from that truth. It holds your gaze and says: look at what we do to each other.
Of course, it’s not entirely impossible to come away from this wondering what the point is, other than the fact that it happened to someone. And you wouldn’t be wrong for asking but look at other war content like Dunkirk, Hurt Locker or Band of Brothers: they all have different ways of saying the same thing.
If I must point out a drawback, it would be the length and duration. At just an hour and thirty-five minutes, it seems somewhat short given the weight of the subject matter. Nonetheless, it's impressive how much they managed to convey in such a tight, limited timeframe. As much as the marginalization and sidelining of civilians and translators is also a significant issue impossible to overlook, at least that ties into the soldiers’ slow gradual disregard for others’ safety beyond their own in the heat of the moment.
Nothing short of a macabre masterstroke in numbing, alienating and fascinating audiences’ five senses to be the ultimate ‘you-are-there’ experience, this is a requiem for both the dead and the living we have left behind, an unflinching, unromanticized dissection on the boots-on-the-ground reality of battle. There are only so many films like this out there that become a searing indictment of the fog of war and its lasting repercussions and actually mean it; far from an easy watch, but it's an essential one.
