Review: "Warfare"

From their inception, the magic of movies was that they could seemingly transport you anywhere and allow you to experience anything. 

The one exception might be movies about war.  No movie can capture the experience of actual experience of combat and armed conflict.  Some have made an admirable attempt.

Samuel Fuller famously made wrote and directed the movie The Big Red One back in 1980.  It was about his experiences as a soldier at the end of World War II when the Allied Forces liberated the Nazi concentration camps—all seen through Fuller’s eyes, portrayed by Mark Hamill.

Steven Spielberg famously recreated the Normandy Invasion in Saving Private Ryan (1998) including the fierce, bloody fighting at Omaha Beach.  It was a milestone with its graphic depiction of gunfire and carnage authenticated by military scholars and veterans.  The sequence is unforgettable.

HBO’s award-winning series Band of Brothers (2001) also took pains to faithfully recreate the final days of the second World War, with the inclusion of military experts and the actual men who were portrayed in the series working directly with the actors who played them.  It elevated the televised war movie genre to a new level with its attention to detail.

Noteworthy movies like Blackhawk Down (2001), Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and American Sniper (2014) all made a serious effort to tell modern war stories honestly and accurately.  They were a far cry from the propagandist Hollywood films of the past that glorified war in the interest of national unity and patriotism during the 1940s. 

Ripples of the Gung-Ho portrayal of the military were still evident in films like the Vietnam-era The Green Berets (1968) starring John Wayne (who famously never served in the military, despite his many performances as a tough-as-nails soldier and war hero).

These days, filmmakers have the technical ability to portray modern warfare with gritty realism, rendered in real time.  That’s exactly what happens in the movie Warfare, co-directed by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza. 

Garland’s previous work includes the sci-fi films Ex Machina (2014) and Annihilation (2018) and his recent political thriller Civil War (2024).  Ray Mendoza is an actor and producer in addition to being a Navy SEAL veteran with 16 years’ experience.  Warfare is his story.  His is portrayed by actor D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai in the movie.

The filmmakers’ vision was to faithfully recreate a military operation that took place back in 2006 in Ramadi, Iraq in which Ray Mendoza’s platoon of Navy SEALS found themselves in enemy territory, surrounded, trapped in a small building and marked for death.  It is a story of courage and valor rendered in real time with the guidance and input of the actual men who were involved.  Many of those men were on set overseeing every detail of what transpired that day, as they could best remember it.  The result is a movie as raw and real as movies like this can get.

Warfare gives the audience an up-close, first-hand look of what took place -- a moment-by-moment account that is unsettling and unsparing.  The jarring sights and sounds underscore the sheer chaos that ensued as shots were fired, hand grenades exploded and large IEDs violently shook the earth.  

The frantic, two-way radio chatter escalates the sense of urgency and drama when several members of the team are seriously wounded.  Real-time satellite images ramp up the tension, tracking enemy activity as well as the approaching reinforcements from miles above the earth, shown as moving video-game-looking dots that are ominously deadly and real.   

Warfare doesn’t spare the audience the grim details of bodies blown in half, and bloody, severed human limbs strewn in the streets.  The movie tells it like it was.  It’s not a glorification of war.  It’s not an indictment of war.  It is a two-hour experience of what it’s like to be in a war (without actual explosions rocking the ground beneath you or real-life bullets ripping through the air all around you).

While it’s impossible for a movie to convey what it’s really like to be in modern combat, Warfare does as much as any movie can do to make the experience as authentic as it can be seen and heard on the big screen. 

It’s a testament to everyone who ever served in the military and risked their lives under extreme duress to protect our safety and freedom.  It’s a tribute to their toughness, courage and dedication, and a reminder of the human side of modern-day military engagement.