by Anthony O'Connor
Worth: $13.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn, Kit Connor, Finn Bennett
Intro:
… an experiment that is as interesting as it is confounding …
A24, once the distributor of navel gazing dramas and niche horror films, has become increasingly mainstream in recent years, tackling new genres and more crowd-pleasing concepts. They found critical and commercial success with the sci-fi drama Everything Everywhere All at Once, box office gold with Alex Garland’s speculative fiction Civil War and they even have what looks like a more traditional romcom, Materialists, dropping later this year. However, one genre you probably didn’t expect from the prolific producers is a straightforward war flick. And yet, Warfare is here to confound your expectations and also make you feel tense for 95 white knuckled minutes.
Warfare is a different kind of war movie to those you might be used to. It follows a platoon of Navy SEALS during the Iraq War, in 2006. We experience what happens to these soldiers in real time on their mission to observe the activity of insurgents in Ramadi, Iraq, and if necessary, take action against them.
The thing is, because of the real time conceit, the audience gets a vivid sense of just how damn boring war is most of the time. The first fifteen minutes of Warfare is basically a bunch of sweaty blokes looking out the windows of the civilian apartment building that they’ve occupied, waiting for something to happen. And then when the action kicks off, it’s fast and nasty and disorienting. There’s nothing heroic here, nothing to cheer or celebrate. It’s a brutal, unflinching look at what war is: politically motivated combat that turns promising young men into bloody hunks of screaming meat.
Performances are uniformly solid, with D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai doing excellent work playing Ray Mendoza (the co-writer/director who experienced this horrific battle in real life), Will Poulter is very likable as Erik, the Officer in Charge, and Joseph Quinn is superb as Sam. The action too, while spare and claustrophobic, is very effective and the choice to have no musical score gives the entire film a sense of grim veracity, enhanced by the fact that living soldiers contributed their memories to the project.
All that being said, one question may bubble up in your mind as you’re watching Warfare – why? What is the purpose of making this film? To show that war is bad? We all kind of knew that. That the Iraq War was a colossal waste of time and life? We knew that too. It’s hard to parse what exactly the mission statement is here, other than faithfully recreating a hideous battle for the sake of bleak entertainment.
Still and all, there will be a certain audience for this. For folks who want to see a well-made, well-acted war flick that makes Full Metal Jacket seem like a jaunty comedy, Warfare is here for you. If you want a realistic, quasi-forensic accounting of a terrible skirmish, then directors Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland have you covered.
For everyone else, this will be an experiment that is as interesting as it is confounding, a project that spends tens of millions of dollars to tell us once again that war is hell, but in higher definition than ever before.
