WARFARE - Mark Reviews Movies

Warfare, A24

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 10, 2025

Co-directors Ray Mendoza, an Iraq War veteran whose experiences serve as the foundation of this story, and Alex Garland have made a unique war film with Warfare. It's about strategy—but mostly what happens when everything goes wrong. It's about combat—but mostly as a pure matter of survival. It's about heroism—but not in taking control of some point on a map and killing a certain number of enemy combatants. Heroism here is in trying to protect a wounded soldier's life, and when that happens in this story, everything else is a distraction, useless noise, or an obstacle that must be overcome by any means available.

There is a case to be made, as many have, that it's impossible to make an anti-war film, simply because there is an inherent degree of vicarious excitement to watching a battle unfold within the safe confines of fiction. Whether or not the filmmakers have such an aim in mind (The thoughtless harm caused by a hoorah-minded soldier suggests they might), the duo have come about as close to countering that claim as any war film that has come before this one.

There are no thrills to be had in this depiction of a bit more than an hour on a single day during the 2006 Battle of Ramadi in Iraq. There is only terror, confusion, blood and viscera, the howls of the wounded, the sounds of bullets striking various surfaces as the shooting gets closer to its targets, and the long, intolerable passage of time between the promise that reinforcements are on the way and their actual arrival.

The screenplay, written by Mendoza and Garland, does present the majority of this episode in real time, and one of the great strengths of a film filled with many of them is how the filmmakers ensure that we feel that passage of time almost immediately from the start. After a brief prologue showing this platoon of Navy SEALS enjoying some relaxation before sneaking into a part of the city at night to take a sniper position, we're quickly reminded of that old adage about war being made up of long periods of boredom.

When—as the rest of that saying goes—the terrifying punctuation of violence arrives, time seems to sit as stilly as during the inactivity. The only thing more frightening for a soldier than waiting for the fighting to start, the film seems to argue by way of its real-time portrayal, is waiting for someone—anyone—to come to help the comrade slowly dying from severe wounds and constant blood loss, crying out in unspeakable pain, and being just conscious enough to know that the situation is as dire as it gets.

That's the scenario that makes up most of this narrative, which revolves around a pair of squads from that platoon, providing cover for a U.S. Marine operation in the city. That's the only background the film provides. It is absent of local or international politics, of any clear understanding of the layout of the city or the location of other military forces beyond a single stretch of street, and of any back story for all of the characters within it. This story exists moment to moment in every imaginable way.

Those early moments are almost completely uneventful. We meet squad commander Erik (Will Poulter), who's basically overseeing his men as Elliott (Cosmo Jarvis) watches buildings across the street through the scope of his sniper rifle, Ray (D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) keeps the other squads aware of what's happening in this location and listens for activity elsewhere over the radio, and most of the squad members sit and wait.

All of these characters have jobs, ranks, and names, of course, but Mendoza and Garland don't focus on such minor details here (One of the subtle ways the script lets us know things have taken a turn from bad to possibly the worst is when Erik drops the surnames, nicknames, and radio callsigns to start pleading with men on a first-name basis). Everything that matters is left to the faces of these men, played with a no-nonsense feeling of professionalism that eventually becomes assorted degrees and colors of shock by the likes of Michael Gandolfini, Joseph Quinn, Kit Connor, and the rest of an ensemble of actors who cut right to the core of the psychological turmoil of this scenario.

Some local men begin moving through the city, looking at the buildings where the SEALs are, and gathering into units of their own (An airborne thermal camera keeps us cognizant of offensive and defensive approaches and positions). The relative silence after civilians begin to take shelter is broken when someone drops a grenade into the two-story apartment building where Erik's team is and where, by the way, the residents, a couple of local families, are kept isolated in a single room.

The rest of the story, after Elliott is injured and another soldier seems concussed from the grenade attack, becomes about getting the men who need to get out of this place out of there. That task becomes nearly impossible following an even more devastating attack, which kills two Iraqi allies, rips a gaping wound in the thigh of Sam (Quinn), and leaves Elliott unconscious, shredded below the waist, and seemingly on the verge of death. As another squad led by Jake (Charles Melton) makes its way to the apartment, a pair of severed legs lie on the street where they fell outside the building as constant, grotesque reminder of the deaths these men don't have time to acknowledge, let alone comprehend.

Time highlights the monotony of the early scenes before the assault. It becomes a frustration after the initial attack, as the SEALs count down the minutes with impatience.

Once lives are at risk, time itself becomes more an enemy here than the anonymous insurgents, most of whom remain off-screen or at an indecipherable distance—only existing, really, by way of the sounds of bullets popping on stone, shattering glass, or banging on metal. The film's sound design is as vital to enveloping us in this chaos as David J. Thompson's handheld but always-coherent cinematography and Fin Oates' dynamic editing. Indeed, the soundscapes here adapt along with the visuals' changing rhythms and perspectives, in order to give a subjective sense of each character's experience (the hollow echo of damaged eardrums, the blasting of radio chatter on a headset, the aural world falling away after listening to Sam's wailing for too long, etc.).

There's a simple but palpable humanity to Warfare that comes through as strongly as the film's depiction of the horrors, confusion, and mess of combat. It's on the faces of these soldiers, in the uncertainty of those local families in the story's brief but potent epilogue, and, before a real-world coda, in the question left hanging, asked since the start of the war in Iraq and so many times before that, in its final shot: What was the point of all of this?

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