Alex Garland and former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza make us wonder: Can a war film ever actually be anti-war? by Dom Sinacola All war movies are now anti-war movies—that is, if an anti-war movie is measured by the severity of its misery . This is an unceasing human imperative in art: to showcase our species’ darkest atrocities through a transcendent exploration of the suffering those atrocities inflict, but to go even more HAM about it than the last guy. To make every war movie more upsetting than the previous war movie. In that persevering spirit of escalation, we get Warfare, Alex Garland’s latest high-concept fodder, distributed by A24 and co-directed by military consultant and former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, who worked closely with Garland on last year’s Civil War. Like in Civil War—a sprawling and somber action-drama set in a near-alternate future where the US is apparently divided into a few major factions, or something—Warfare removes most explanation for its historical context to hyperfocus on war as existential, experiential terror.  Garland and Mendoza, who also wrote the film together, do not catch up the audience on the the geopolitical circumstances surrounding the Iraq War, nor inform viewers of the specific campaign in which the film takes place, nor really provide any information beyond an opening couple title cards (font is Courier New, a bit of serious journalistic anti-flourish) that establish some basics. The film is located in Iraq, during the US occupation in November 2006, and is made entirely of the vivid memories of those who survived the film’s events.  Cue the Alpha One team of Navy SEALs, some two dozen dudes (give or take a dude) tightly packed into a small room with one computer monitor to share a brotherly dance party around the music video for Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me.” This introduction to the ensemble is important to linger upon because it is the only moment of unbridled joy expressed in the entire film.  From this point forward, Garland and Mendoza intend to prove that war is in fact Hell. Not an adventure, not commercial fare, and no jubilant venue for an early-2000s club remix of Steve Winwood’s “Valerie.” There will now be only the incessant crack of gunfire in the night, the unholy screaming of people in inconceivable pain, and the ambient weight of pointless cruelty. Ray Mendoza (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) is the closest member of Alpha One to a main character, if only because the man co-wrote the film with an almost procedural dedication to reenactment, his POV Warfare’s most salient. Regardless, Ray is barely distinguished from his cohort of indefatigably charming, capable young character actors (Cosmo Jarvis and Michael Gondolfini) and future leading jawlines (Charles Melton, Noah Centineo, and Joseph Quinn, whose cries of pain will haunt your weekend). These beautiful boys are our avatars for real people who in November of 2006 were given the occasional chance to be brave or not, get hurt or not, peel back the veil of death and take a glimpse or not. Such choices take the place of characterization. Through meticulous sound design and pitiless handheld camerawork, the film moves from the fractured perspective of one soldier to another. It’s uniquely exhausting; a recipe for clenched orifices. Shot by cinematographer David J. Johnson, a camera operator on Civil War, it proceeds as part all-night fever dream and part vérité experiment. What begins as a routine mission in a residential home, panicking family included, spins even further out of control as gathering jihadists in interchangeable track pants, head scarves, and collared shirts close in on the team’s location.  Horrors unfold and the night shifts into desolate morning,and the team’s chances of survival grow increasingly dire. The rigor of the military industrial complex comes to a flailing halt in the face of unmitigated chaos.   All of this requires Warfare to bear some exceptionally gruesome imagery, which Garland is no stranger to. 2022’s phantasmagoric Men asks: What if all guys are shapeshifting ghouls conceived in the same giant primordial womb, doomed to be born and die in an endless cycle of grotesque invagination—and not metaphorically but actually in front of you—and the guy is your neighbor?  Too often, Garland’s films feel like he’s trying to find hard answers for harder questions, preoccupied with using his filmmaking to solve grand metaphysical puzzles. Can one’s personal journey with depression take on cosmic proportions? Garland loosely adapted Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation. Can a war film be apolitical? Civil War is his response. Can a war film be anti-war? …wait, say that again. I can’t hear you over Joseph Quinn’s nightmarish screeching.  Though monumentally unpleasant, Warfare is still deeply cinematic. Exciting, even, despite its best efforts. But it refuses to be anything richer than that, to actually confront the metaphysical conundrum of what we’re enduring onscreen with conviction, or explore how trauma can contort the way these survivors reclaim their recollections from the fog of mass death, or to express any  clear morality beyond that war is vaguely bad.  Instead, Garland and Mendoza cut together an impressively sensual pastiche of war-movie-making. They imagine immersion, disturbing and harrowingly real, as only the cinema can do it: gunshots like eardrum welts in an IMAX theater—big, bleeding-loud, and really not much fun at all.  Warfare opens in wide release Fri April 11. ...read more read less