Warfare, Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s assiduous new film on a single episode of the American war in Iraq, opens with a title card typical to a war picture: date, location, barebones summary – 11 November 2006, in Ramadi, Iraq. Navy Seal team alpha one is supporting marines in insurgents’ territory. And then one final, unusual detail in place of the standard “based on a true story” – “This film uses only their memories.” The “only” is an ominous indicator: this is a film working against the Hollywood tide to gloss, simplify or narrativize. Warfare, based primarily on Mendoza’s memories of that day as a former Seal, as well as those of fellow soldiers and civilians present, is as much an experiment of translation as a cinematic achievement, a movie defined by both what it shows and what it does not.
Much of the press surrounding Warfare has focused on this exacting verisimilitude, its mission to create the “most accurate war film possible”. If something could not be double-checked by another account, it was not included. The intricate, fully immersive soundscape, designed by Glenn Freemantle, encompasses the vast volume spectrum of conflict – civilian chatter, a hand grazing a windowsill, burps of radio, destabilizing patters of gunfire and the sonic boom of a “show of force” military flyover that had nearly the same fetal-position effect on the theater audience as it did the characters. With the exception of a first scene observing the soldiers raucously dancing to the erotic music video for Eric Prydz’s Call On Me – underscoring just how young they are, how much pressure must be released – the movie proceeds in more or less real time. Ninety-ish minutes at a house the soldiers picked because one said “I like it”, at first tracking and then fighting nameless insurgents, with dialogue primarily in undiluted military jargon.
