The war film has always been something of a contract with the audience, a pact that says: come, and I’ll show you the heat of heroism, the terror behind the steel, the struggle of boys made old by violence. What Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland have dared, in Warfare, is to tear up that contract and write something new and starker in its place: this is what it feels like to be trapped in someone else’s war, to be battered by noise and confusion, to never quite know who your enemy is or why you’re here, beyond some abstract equation of duty and disaster.
Drawing from his own ordeal in Iraq, Mendoza doesn’t give us myth, or even much narrative release, his script is assembled from the shrapnel of testimony, presented in the blurring real-time of a single mission, with language and rituals so precise and unfamiliar they become another barrier between viewer and understanding. There’s a crisp daring in how the film folds us inside its codes and acronyms, forcing us to feel the chill of being an outsider in something supposedly familiar. The only way out is through, and the only order to this carnage is the grim choreography of survival.
The performances, though uniformly strong, discreetly avoid the grandstanding that the Oscar reels live for. D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, as Mendoza, retreats into an anxiety so tightly coiled it verges on paralysis, when he speaks, it’s clipped, matter-of-fact, so at odds with the chaos. Cosmo Jarvis, as Elliott, offers a window into agony both physical and existential; the sequence following his wounding is a minor masterpiece of suspense, where sound design dissolves into muffled surreality, and you are left feeling that the real cruelty is how long the suffering lingers before any mercy, morphine, or memory loss, steps in. Around them, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, and Joseph Quinn are all faces strained by tension, youth burning off in frightful increments; their bravery is as much about following the next order as about any conscious gallantry. There are no John Waynes here, just children in battle armor, eyes unsteady, words lost under the weight of jargon and fear.
Much should be said for how Mendoza and Garland marshal their technique. The film is unapologetically brutal, yes, but what’s most jarring is the rhythm, thirty minutes of spectral quiet, interrupted by volleys of gunfire that border on the sensory overwhelming. This is not stylized violence; it’s violence as business transaction and accident, and the only heroism here is in making the right call a half-moment sooner than disaster. Cinematographer Kitty West finds a grotesque lyricism in hush and haze, the dust, the shattered daylight, the Bradley “IfVs” glinting like the toolboxes of some infernal mechanic come to repair a world that won’t be fixed.
Warfare is also a film defined by what it refuses: there is no rousing music, no flag-waving denouement, no climactic speech to tidy up the meaning. Americans are not glorified, instead, we see the violence they inflict as much as the violence they absorb. The crux comes not in the surviving, but in the aftermath: the house left pulverized, families huddled in shock, no “victory” but a slow, numbing egress. This is a realism too honest for most audiences, we are not asked to root for either side, only to wish for the ceasing of pain. If there is a villain, it is the system that normalizes endless brutality; if there are heroes, they are accidental ones, their courage inseparable from the terror and bewilderment.
And yet, with all this, the film never feels like a polemic or a scold. Garland and Mendoza sidestep the op-eds, instead trusting noise, chaos, and hesitation to do the talking. The sound design, a swirl of voices, orders, and sudden, ringing silences, invites us to dissociate along with the characters, watching as boys are ordered into decisions that stain long after the credits. One cannot “enjoy” this film, precisely, but to watch it is to be confronted with a kind of aesthetic experience rare in contemporary war cinema, something akin to The Battle of Algiers recast for the age of the twenty-four-hour news cycle, unsentimental, relentless, unforgettable.
Warfare doesn’t give us dragons to slay or medals to pin on chests. It exposes the raw machinery of battle, the fear, the system, the waste, the simple miracle of living long enough to be haunted. In the end, the film’s final image, a dedication to Elliott, and the real SEAL team appearing in the credits, abandons illusion entirely, as if to say: all artifice ends here, with the bodies, with the debt that can never be paid.
This is a war film not about glory, but about the void that glory leaves behind, a masterpiece of suspense and a document of futility, as precise and wounding as any bullet that finds its mark.
