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 least, some attempt at sentimental string-pulling to knit an emotional attachment to the characters. But Warfare, a forensic, close to real-time re-enactment of a 2006 battle fought during the Iraq war, rejects all that. Co-written and co-directed by Garland and former US Navy Seal Mendoza, the film’s radically stripped-back approach gives us next to no background on the characters, a platoon of Seals, or the operation, a surveillance mission in the Iraqi city of Ramadi. Nor does it take a stance on any moral questions about the Iraq war. Instead, it focuses on evoking, with almost unbearably visceral intensity, the experiences of a group of highly trained professionals who have been hired to do a job. And they are having a really bad day at work.

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