Soon after A24 teased Warfare on their social media a couple of months ago, the posts’ comment sections were filled with disbelief and rage. People scoffed that Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation, Civil War) had officially sold out and that the indie dream factory that gave us Moonlight and Lady Bird was now distributing American military propaganda.
The backlash was nearly drowned out by official ‘first-look’ reviews. A24 seemingly screened the movie for a theatre of diehard Call of Duty fans and told them to tweet about it. Comprehensively praising Warfare’s visceral, harrowing and realistic depiction of modern warfare, these commentaries ignored its politics, perhaps accepting co-director and Iraq war veteran Ray Mendoza’s reassurances that this film has ‘no political message’. But the highly political decision to deprive Warfare of a political message renders it little more than morally hollow paean to the US military.
The film recruits a slew of promising young actors (Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton) and dresses them up in American fatigues, a rite of passage for every generation of A-listers-to-be: Platoon (1986); Saving Private Ryan (1998); Black Hawk Down (2001) and The Hurt Locker (2010).
After the MGM lion roars silently — a sombre start — the film drops us in Ramadi, a city 110 kilometres west of Baghdad. Our young soldiers cheer along to the sexed-up music video of Eric Prydz’ 2004 hit Call on Me in a moment of innocent chauvinism. Some of the boys look a little bewildered at first, but it doesn’t take long for everyone to get on board.
Hard cut to a silent midnight street and the troops prowl for a house to occupy. The near-silence is tense until one soldier whispers, “I like this one. Let’s take it.” The unit kicks down the door of a sturdy two-storey home, herding a terrified family into a bedroom and setting up shop for their mission: providing overwatch for an upcoming ground operation.
Day breaks and the movie blossoms a bit; Mendoza and Garland diligently evoke the unexpected boredom of warfare. Extended takes show listless soldiers lazing on the floor, fiddling with their gear and nervously looking out of windows (Joseph Quinn does this exceptionally well). Some perform the essential tasks — monitoring potential insurgents, scouting the area with drones, and radioing acronyms to higher-ups. The cinematography in these sequences is fantastic: richly saturated tableaus appear more as still life photos, like a shot of the tower of cushions upon which Elliot (Cosmo Jarvis) and his sniper are perched. The unit is then sprung and things deteriorate.
The sound design is gripping. Explosions provide opportunities to explore entirely new dimensions of hearing. In a memorable scene, a bleary-eyed young soldier blasts his machine gun into a cloud of smoke and dust after a detonation, his gunshots deep rumbles accompanied by eerie pings that sound like dropping coins. The entire midrange of the film’s audio is obliterated, leaving behind a freakish aural skeleton and a closer look into the psyche.
Viewers realise pretty quickly that being an American soldier in Iraq would have been pretty unpleasant. Never mind the 200,000 Iraqi civilians killed: therein lies the issue. The movie’s cacophony, while masterfully produced, doesn’t distract from its insistence that this operation occurred in a political vacuum.
“Everything Is Based on Memory” is the film’s tagline. A movie like this should not be based on memories. How about the truth? Accounts of war based on ‘memory’ are a fantastic way to propagandise (as seen in American Sniper) and avoid responsibility (like in the real-life trajectory of the Abu Ghraib prosecutions). This tagline is an evasion of accountability for a shameless depoliticisation of one of the most politically charged events in modern history.
It’s clear that Garland and Mendoza believe that dramatising a unit’s mission in which no American troops died is more important than reckoning with the widespread and rightful guilt that many Americans and allies feel for the horrors perpetrated by the USA during its invasion of Iraq. Of course, not all US soldiers tortured and murdered, but it’s hard not to think of the United States military as a monolith when the film makes very little effort to distinguish between its characters. The extent of critical thinking the directors seem to want from the audience is figuring out which TV show you recognise each cast member from.
The film’s propaganda is effective at times; there are scenes where warfare seems like the pinnacle of righteous masculine self-expression, and the casting undoubtedly flatters the veterans. But as I watched, every time I remembered the US’ false rationale for invading Iraq in the first place; or the fact that they had an all-volunteer military force; or the atrocities committed at Abu Ghraib prison; or the violations of international law perpetrated in Guantanamo Bay; or George W. Bush’s inadvertent admission just two years ago that the invasion was not justified, my seat got a little more uncomfortable and I wondered why this movie was even made.
Alex Garland’s career trajectory has been vexing. His career is built upon philosophically and thematically rich films like the artificial intelligence sci-fi Ex Machina (2014), the environmentally existential Annihilation (2018) and the awkwardly mystifying Men (2022); yet, all 2024’s Civil War really asked was, ‘How crazy would it be if California and Texas teamed up?’ The question most asked in Warfare is ‘Where’s my fucking morphine?’
The film closes out with a sequence of the cast meeting their real-life veteran counterparts, who assist with gunfight choreography. The epic, pounding electronic rock song that accompanies this montage makes it a pretty uncomfortable watch. However, the real insult to injury is yet to come.
In what I thought was shaping up to be a surprisingly philosophical ending, Garland and Mendoza show a still of the real Iraqi family whose home was occupied and besieged, their faces blurred. The shot lingers just long enough to make you wonder if they might be the real victims after all… Then, we are promptly shown a photo of the cast grinning alongside the veterans. Elliot, our injured sniper, bears a goofy smile and proudly sticks his middle finger up to the camera. Who, or what, is this directed at? If Garland & Mendoza cared more about the political implications of a movie like this, you’d think this wouldn’t be the image they leave us with.
But it is. A veteran flipping you off for thinking this movie should be something more than a politically limp puff piece for those who nearly died looking for those pesky, non-imaginary weapons of mass destruction.
Warfare enters Australian cinemas on April 17.
