Few American war movies have featured the kind of breathtaking tension Warfare instills — or the kind of eardrum-rupturing sound. Coming off the speculative war photographer drama Civil War, Alex Garland (who co-directs Warfare with former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza) crafts an explosively gripping Iraq War thriller, whose mere 95 minutes play out like an extended nightmare of blood and bone. Its screenplay is drawn from traumatic memories as retold by U.S. soldiers on the ground, making it both fragile, and susceptible to highly subjective whims. The result is a harrowing work of cinema whose intuitive (and at times ugly) story is locked in an inherent clash with its own top-down imagery.
The broad strokes of Warfare resemble your run-of-the-mill “war on terror” production, à la Peter Beg’s Afghanistan-set Mark Wahlberg vehicle Lone Survivor. Both films are based on true stories, and follow Navy SEALs surveilling, and then engaging, in firefights with armed insurgents. But where Berg’s movie has an almost holy reverence for American death in the line of duty, Garland and Mendoza’s features no such glory around suffering. Its matter-of-fact irreligiousness verges on nihilistic, making its protracted scenes (and screams) of anguish so excessive that they eventually tip over into slapstick hilarity. Mind you: that’s a good thing. It’s the kind of movie where you have no choice but to laugh — if only to relieve some of the maddening tension — at the soldiers’ horrifying predicament.
