With WARFARE, Alex Garland joins ranks with the post World War I poets who put the lie to Horace’s bromide, “Dulce et decorum for patria mori.” Which is to say it is sweet and proper to die for one’s country. Based on the memories of Ray Mendoza and others who took part in a 2006 raid in Ramadi Province, Iraq, there is nothing sweet about the death depicted, nor the carnage that engulfs Mendoza’s squad of Navy Seals. As for whether it is proper in this instance, that is for the audience to decide, though Garland’s view is crystal clear. As is that other bromide, soldiers don’t fight for their country, they fight for the soldier next to them.
Told in real time once the shooting begins, we are not given the cliché backstories for these men, nor any intel on why they are taking over an Iraqi house in the middle of the night. Using only the memories of those involved, and only their first names, the film becomes an intense, searingly immersive experience that has as its focus the effect of battle on the people involved, civilian and military, at its most basic level. Camaraderie is established, and adrenaline pumped, with the aerobics video the Seals watch before going on their mission. They’re not exercising. They’re ogling the spandex-wrapped women flexing and stretching to pulsing music, the booming of which foreshadows the sound of artillery that these men with shortly face.
The details of memory add an arresting element of verisimilitude: a finger wiping dust from wrought iron in the house, the way a mangled ankle snags as a soldier is being dragged to (relative) safety, the tedium of waiting that finds expression in pranks. The level of tension once the Seals commandeer the building chosen on a whim builds from the moment of their stealth entrance into the two apartments and families awakened to guns in their faces and the incongruous assurance that everything is okay.
The images of families whose only mistake is being in a home chosen at random, huddled together as their domicile crumbles and turns to rubble is a powerful one. Blood soaks into the floors, and the Seals becoming more and more desperate as they take casualties and realize that help may not be coming. There is an ironic juxtaposition of calling in a jet to fly so low over the street they are on that dust flies in a whirlwind as a show of America’s force, and the American citizens, the Seals, being unable to walk five steps out the front door onto that street without taking artillery fire. And in the immediacy of the fear these men are dealing with, and the drone shots that intersperse the action, reducing them and their adversaries to white dots on a background indistinguishable from a video game.
We are told nothing about the Seals individual histories, as mentioned, but through precise, intense performances from the cast, we do learn who they are. From an officer (Will Poulter) coming to terms with how training cannot truly prepare any solider for battle emotionally, to the radio operator, played by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai in a riveting performance that is a master class on how the power of understatement. His character rises to the occasion while coming to those same terms, there is a vitality that cuts like a razor and reveals humanity at its best and most vulnerable negotiating the fog of war minute by minute with a preternatural resolve.
WARFARE is one of the most damning films about combat even made. Garland keeps it all on a very human scale, never for an instant letting us forget what it is that is asked when we send people into battle. It is impossible to see this film and be unchanged, no matter your politics, no matter your ethics.
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