As Warfare bursts into cinemas, its unique angle to the Iraq war has us wondering if any war film can truly be neutral and apolitical.
Alex Garland has a keen interest in conflict and war. Garland’s 2024 film Civil War imagined the United States as a country split in half by a merciless civil war, a scenario which felt eerily possible in current times. His latest film, Warfare, takes us back in time to a real conflict.
The film, co-written and directed by Garland and his Civil War military consultant Ray Mendoza, depicts a real military operation, – of which Mendoza was a part – which took place in Iraq in 2006. The film unfolds mostly in real time and is comprised of Mendoza’s recollections, corroborated by his fellow servicemen.
Warfare is expertly made. Its sound design is brutal and loud, every bullet and wound is deeply felt. Its actors, made up of some of the brightest young stars in Hollywood, immerse themselves into the situation. In other words, it’s a powerful film with lasting impact.
Yet, something doesn’t quite sit right.
Warfare never states the reason why the American soldiers were in Iraq in the first place. The Bush administration’s “war on terror” was in full swing during the Iraq war, which began in 2003 and lasted until 2011. The war cost the US and Iraq over 150,000 lives and was heavily criticised for the severe human rights abuses that happened during it.
During the Warfare press tour, Garland and Mendoza have emphasised their goal of making the film as accurate and honest as possible. The aim was to make Warfare an immersive experience that highlights the cost of war on a human level. At the film’s UK premiere in London, Garland said he hoped their “neutral approach” would allow audiences to “receive this as adults in their own way with whatever they bring, whatever their opinions are on the Iraq war – it doesn’t matter.”
Garland and Mendoza set themselves a strict rule of not inventing anything for the film and only following Mendoza’s recollections. This is a film about camaraderie and surviving the impossible, not about the war itself.
But can a war film ever be neutral? Can such a film exist without a point of view or a political side to it? More importantly, can we afford neutrality in such times of political unrest?
Civil War was criticised for a similar unwillingness to engage in the inherent politics of its narrative. Garland briefly establishes Texas and California having formed an unlikely alliance and Nick Offerman plays an unnamed President who resembles another controversial US leader currently in power. Garland and Offerman have consistently denied any direct real-world inspirations.
Read more: Civil War | How political is Alex Garland’s film?
In Warfare, the Iraqis are mostly seen through sniper Elliot Miller’s blurry scope as he keeps track of a local market and tries to decipher whether people walking past are a threat or are just living their regular, day-to-day lives. For quite a while, Warfare resembles Jarhead more than Apocalypse Now in its depiction of the mundanity of war, but there’s a tension to the lull. We know something is coming.
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When shit eventually does hit the fan – and oh boy, does it ever – we never see the opposing forces taking aim at our soldiers. At most they’re distant figures, whose screams are heard as one of the soldiers takes them down. Gunfire surrounds the Navy SEALs from all directions and they’re trapped in their chosen house where they essentially took the house’s inhabitants as hostages the previous night. As the situation grows increasingly dire, one of the men notes that there are “bad guys” upstairs and he is ordered to keep it safe.
Garland has spoken about the film’s neutrality extensively, just as he has been asked about it relentlessly. Rolling Stone asked about Garland’s intentions of telling the larger story of the war and why the Americans were there in the first place. Garland replied: “The beauty of presenting a narrative neutrally, as factually as possible, is all the implicit discussions that can flow from that. They don’t need a flag stuck in them. They don’t need an agenda.”
Memories, after all, are subjective, and Garland isn’t denying this either. “It’s memory-based and it’s subjective,” the co-director told The New York Times, adding: “I don’t think we can say everything you see is true, but what we can say is everything here is honest.”
Read more: Warfare review | The human cost of war laid bare
Yet, Garland and Mendoza are behind the camera, calling the shots, deciding what we are watching, hearing and, to a point, feeling. They can never be neutral; a movie is always someone’s point of view, communicating someone’s version, a specific side of a story.
We might see Cosmo Jarvis’ sniper Elliott Miller in terrible pain but somehow grinding his teeth through it, or Joseph Quinn’s Sam screaming in shock and agony. D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai’s Mendoza sheds tears of confusion and Will Poulter’s commander admits, shell-shocked, that he doesn’t know what to do in a situation like this. We’re invited to feel their pain, empathise with their predicament and root for their survival, but Garland and Mendoza make no effort to create any kind of larger nuance to the story.
Art might try to imitate life, but more than anything, art tells us a lot about life. Watch almost any film from the Cold War era and you’ll be overwhelmed with fears of the enemy sneaking in, threatening your peaceful, democratic life. The last few years have seen a rise in films exploring women’s rights and misogyny in the aftermath of the MeToo movement and the overturning of Roe vs. Wade in the US. Films like Women Talking, Promising Young Woman, Never Rarely Sometimes Always and even The First Omen all spoke to the anxieties of the modern world.
Warfare also goes out of its way to emphasise the camaraderie between its soldiers. There is no one lead and certainly no traditional heroes, but Warfare pits them against the “bad guys” anyway. The bad guys have no names, no faces, but the film’s unspoken context weighs heavily on it.
Whether or not Mendoza and Garland want it to, Warfare exists in the real world, depicts real events, and robbing your audience of its context feels ignorant. The film is dedicated to Elliot Miller, who has no memories of the day itself. Mendoza said he wanted to recreate the events for him and to show other soldiers that they are seen, that their experiences haven’t been forgotten.
Warfare is unlikely to push anyone to enlist, and Garland and Mendoza’s eye for detail makes the movie an imposing, often spectacular experience. It feels critical of war, but it refuses to say why, only blindly implying there are bad guys and good guys in every conflict. For some, this will be one of the film’s many strengths, but for this writer, it left a slightly sour taste in the mouth.
Warfare is in UK cinemas 18th April.
