Warfare review – nerve-shredding real-time Iraq war film drags you into visceral frontline combat
Co-directors Alex Garland and former US Navy Seal Ray Mendoza recreate a 2006 battle with almost unbearable intensity – and a dazzling ensemble cast It’s up there with the first 23 bruising minutes of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan or Elem Klimov’s harrowing and relentless Come and See . This is film-making that doesn’t just show you the horrors of war; it forces you to taste the dust and the choking panic, smell the fear and the cordite and the tinny metallic tang of spilled blood. Warfare , by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, is the most forceful and unflinching depiction of combat since Edward Berger’s 2023 Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front . It’s also one of the boldest and most formally daring. There are certain conventions at play in most war movies. Among them is the unwritten rule that however blisteringly hellish the depiction of combat, there’s a mitigating audience sop in the form of a flag-waving message about the nobility of the cause. Or, at the very le...
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