‘Can’t wait to get home and see my girl!’ or ‘ As long as I’ve got my lucky mascot I’ll be fine! Or even ‘This is my last tour of duty before I can leave the corp’. In war films these are nearly always the last things a character says before they’re blown to pieces. But Warfare co-writer and co-director Alex Garland has steered clear of all these cliches as we follow a team of Navy SEALS initially watching that Eric music video for Eric Prydz ‘Call on me’ the one with the all female aerobics class seemingly wearing dental floss instead of leotards much to the approval of the soldiers as they watch the video bobbing their heads to the beat and grinning. It’s the first and last time they’ll be smiling before they embark on their mission to secure a surveillance position in a residential apartment in the Ramadi province of Iraq in 2006. And it’s here that they will remain to give cover for a ground troop offensive in the area.
Among the team is Ray Mendoza (D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai), commanding officer Erik (Will Poulter), sniper Elliott (Cosmo Jarvis), MacDonald (Michael Gandolfini) and Sam (Joseph Quinn) as well as two Iraqi scouts working with them and the first measured and meticulous half hour or so covers the tedium of their waiting and watching anything that might be deemed suspicious as Elliott observes through his sniper rifle’s sights at the jihadis in the street clearly up to something. It’s an increasingly tense watch for all of them and as in Alex Garland’s previous film, ‘Civil War’ there’s an excellent use of sound that emphasises Elliot’s breathing as he watches the potential insurgents over the road. At times the silence is deafening. It’s when he hands over to a less experienced colleague as he goes to take a break that things go awry when there’s a momentary glimpse of a jihadi taking a heavy duty machine gun into the opposite house. The Navy SEAL hesitates in the split second he has to make the decision to shoot but it’s too late to take the shot. Shortly after it sees the teams position under attack. What follows in apparent real time sees the soldiers undergo a furious bombardment of fire and explosions that sees a rescue carrier destroyed and two colleagues severely injured. Retreating to the cover of the apartment the SEALS lose air cover and their base refuses to send another rescue vehicle.
Their fight is brilliantly realised with again the sound central to much of the action as low flying jets provide a ‘show of force’, and the explosions mute the hearing of both the soldiers and in turn the audience. The films many strengths is its realism thanks to the help of Ray Mendoza himself who had been a soldier in this particular incident and has acted as a military advisor on Garland’s Civil War and now co-writes and co-directs from what we are told is a film based on memories of what happened.
Warfare compresses the incident into an effective and gruelling 95 minute running times that takes you into the heart of the trauma and dilemma the soldiers find themselves but we never really find out much about the team. Equally the Iraqi civilian residents whose apartment they commandeer are bundled away out of sight into a room and ignored for much of the film until near the end. But whilst like all of Alex Garland’s films, Warfare is well made and wholly compelling nit there’s a sense of wondering just why this particular story has been made into a film. It’s not an anti-war film, there’s no political insight, it has no narrative but is instead episodic albeit out of necessity as it is based on the soldiers memories. Not that that takes away from how well made Warfare is but Garland’s films have always had more beyond the surface and that’s just not the case here.
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