Written and directed by Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland
A marine lies on the ground floor of an Iraqi house in a pool of his own blood. Shots pepper the house he and his unit are holed up in, waiting for an extraction that may or may not come. The marine, groaning through gritted teeth, delirious, doesn’t know how long he has to hold on for, or if he can. A fellow marine tries to hype him up, regurgitating the standard brouhaha. A different marine tells him to knock it off. Nobody needs that shit right now.
Warfare, co-directed by Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland, strives to provide an authentic look at what it’s like to serve in the military. There are no blazes of glory, it features no close-quarter combat with a dastardly enemy, it offers no superhuman heroics. Instead, there is the tedium of waiting, rote protocol followed to the letter, and a reminder of what modern thinker Mike Tyson once said: everyone has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. Warfare is how a unit puts a broken plan back together.
There’s not much left in the war movie chum barrel. Filmmakers have come at it from every angle, many times from the same angle like cannon fodder, and I don’t begrudge anyone dismissing another one as simply another one. Warfare isn’t a maverick, it doesn’t break the mold or reinvent the genre, but it does add some color around the edges to Hollywood’s camo-colored love letter to America’s favorite industry.
It doesn’t do so by showing the inglorious sides to war, of which there are plenty, and those sides are well-documented too. Turning big strong boys into trembling, shell-shocked husks is by now a requirement if the movie doesn’t want to be sneered at and dismissed as braindead propaganda.
No, Warfare feels different because of its slavish devotion to realism, for better or worse. A lot of it, were it not for the constant implication that the world can crack open at any minute, is boring. Soldiers keep tabs on the comings and going of the locals, taking covert peeks out the window. They keep quiet, murmuring operational inquiries to each other and coordinating information over the radio.
When things do come to a head, Warfare turtles. A sucker punch sees some soldiers laid to waste, broken if alive, and as for those still standing, their senses retract. Ears blown out, there’s not much but the muffled pops of gunfire, raspy and anguished breathing, and the dust-up, literal and mental, shrinks the world to just a few feet in either direction.
Co-director Mendoza has a background in the Marines, and this movie is based on his, and his peers’ memories. You sense this is where Warfare draws it wish to both present a realistic portrait of war, but also celebrate what “realistic” heroism looks like: soldiers, trained and capable, relying on that training to operate in a disastrous environment and headspace, going by the book to the best of their ability, and operating in the margins if necessary. There are no jazz players in Warfare, because this is the marching band.
But this is still just military stuff, even if that stuff is more level-headed than what we’re used to. Co-director Garland seems aware of this, and so he adds his own version of the fog of war, letting his audience spend the entire movie wondering why this is all happening in the first place.
A line at the beginning of the movie says the marines are there to support the army operating in the area. The army is nowhere to be seen. There’s no real justification given for why they’re in that house. The parameters for success were never clear. There are no lessons learned.
In spirit, Warfare is Uncle Sam leaving a group of middle school boys on the side of the highway, giving them a vague task to complete, and threatening them to not come home before they figure it out. Yes, this does make Warfare a metaphor for the entire U.S. invasion of Iraq.
With military-like discipline and adherence to protocol, Warfare offers what seems an authentic look at the day in the life of marines when that day is an awful one. What elevates it from mere training video is a moral ambiguity which it casts around itself like the fog of war, ultimately taking a slightly fresh approach to America’s preferred form of diplomacy.
Mikkel Frederiksen 