This terrific Iraq War picture is as anti-war as it gets, adopting a pure, minimalist aesthetic but operating with a maximalist Oscar-worthy sound design, as several soldiers holed up in enemy territory await support and rescue.
Review #2,997
Dir. Alex Garland & Ray Mendoza
2025 | USA | Drama, War | 95min | 2.00:1 | English
Not rated – likely to be M18 for intense war violence and bloody/grisly images, and language throughout.
Cast: D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Finn Bennett
Plot: A platoon of Navy SEALs embark on a dangerous mission in Ramadi, Iraq, with the chaos and brotherhood of war retold through their memories of the event.
Awards: –
Distributor: A24 / Apple TV+
Accessibility Index
Subject Matter: Moderate – Iraq War; US Navy SEALS; Anti-War
Narrative Style: Straightforward
Pace: Normal
Audience Type: Slightly Mainstream
Viewed: Screener
Spoilers: No
Fresh from Civil War (2024), Alex Garland collaborates with former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza for this intense and haunting war film that seems to have gone under the radar.
It is a terrific work and an anti-war film in both senses of the word—it clearly shows the pointlessness of war, but from a creative standpoint, it does so in the most methodical way possible by adopting a pure, minimalist aesthetic but operating with a maximalist Oscar-worthy sound design.
As such, it almost feels like you are in Iraq in 2006, with this group of American soldiers holed up in a house in enemy territory as they anxiously await support to evacuate the severely wounded.
Warfare, based on soldiers’ memory according to its opening titles, is direct and to-the-point, with no subplots, no fillers, no sensationalism, no politicking, just people on both sides under extreme duress.
Of course, one can now, in hindsight, blame Bush Jr. and his belligerent team of warmongers for the lies that have resulted in the deaths of more than 4,000 American soldiers and 200,000 Iraqi civilians.
But unless we see them at the Hague someday to answer for their crimes against humanity, that niggling sense of injustice won’t go away for a long time.
“Is he peeking or probing?”
It is this niggling sense that undergirds Warfare as it is intentionally stripped of any meaningful context—why were these soldiers there in the first place? To fight whom and for what?
Much of the film is about waiting; time stretches, and a minute feels like an eternity when one is in pain. The heroism of war is tossed aside, and in comes the moment-to-moment, wall-to-wall barrage of deafening noise—or silences.
Garland and Mendoza’s assured filmmaking gives it a no-nonsense, muscular edge, one that is rightly bereft of stylistic excesses.
At first, I was perplexed as to why Garland would make an Iraq War picture in this day and age, when American exceptionalism is no longer the force it was decades ago, and with much of the world increasingly wary of their dangerous rhetoric and false narratives.
Well, it is a sobering reminder of what the world stands to lose if one single country has the power to unilaterally decide on the fate of an entire population. Two decades on, this is unfortunately still true.
Grade: A-
Trailer:
Eternality Tan 