Arts & Culture

Warfare
Where: In theatres
What: Movie, 95 mins.
When: Fri., April 11
Genre: War
Rating: NNN (out of 5)
Why You Should Watch: A full-frontal assault on the senses made for the big screen

FILMS ROOTED in real experiences or incidents quickly amplify that quality with grand, declarative opening statements like “based on true events” or “inspired by a true story.” While such assertions toy with the truth, there’s a pull to these words, drawing us closer to ultimately believing the unbelievable. First-time writer-director Ray Mendoza and Civil War director Alex Garland’s Warfare takes the oft-used gimmick to another level by making a clear, deliberate distinction that it uses only the memories of its real-life protagonists — including Mendoza himself, an Iraq War veteran who experienced the film’s events firsthand. While, on the surface, the claim reads as another marketing tactic, it taps directly into the core of the film’s subversive structure.

Warfare is less of a movie and more of a cinematic experiment in perspective. In a filmmaking tradition that often sees civilian directors tackle historic conflicts, Garland and Mendoza craft a full-frontal assault on the senses that submerges us in the shellshocked, panicked and hardened shoes of its characters as they endure a single, manic skirmish amidst the Iraq War across a suffocatingly tight 95-minute runtime.

It’s an approach that’s markedly anti-audience and anti-film, in which plot structure is abandoned, no character arcs are fulfilled and what remains is a strict window of time in which silence is made as deafening as an IED blast. While Warfare can easily be chalked up as another “war is hell” outing, it totes a new kind of cinematic language that bypasses that contention, infiltrating the complex, traumatic processes of memory to craft something not only unflinchingly unvarnished but shockingly palpable.

However, the enclosed, sensory-overloading perspective of Warfare curtails a wider criticism of America’s invasion of Iraq. In exclusively operating within a vacuum of bullets and bloodshed, this American production, from an American distributor — the taste-making A24 — obfuscates any larger understanding of the conflict and the devastating impact of its recreated battle on the region and country it tore through, let alone the exploits of the U.S. military. As a result, Warfare finds itself sharing much in common with a slick piece of propaganda, depoliticizing something inherently political in an effort to honour its brothers and sisters in arms.

Warfare’s plot, if it can be called that, can be boiled down into a sentence: In real time, a platoon of U.S. Navy Seals attempts to survive a mission during the Battle of Ramadi on Nov. 19, 2006. But such brevity is the point, as the film’s recreation isn’t so much focused on the “why” and “what” of things as it is the harrowing “how.” Featuring an all-star cast of rising talent — including D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (Reservation Dogs) as Mendoza himself, Will Poulter (Death of a Unicorn), Cosmo Jarvis (Shogun), Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things), Michael Gandolfini (son of The Sopranos star James Gandolfini) and Charles Melton (May December) to name a few — Warfare first slowly and intentionally allows us to settle in with these cogs of the war machine, taking us through a mini rave set to Eric Prydz’s Call on Me and then leisurely cascading through the troop’s sniper nest before hell is suddenly unleashed.

It’s here, within the fog of chaos, where Garland and Mendoza’s cinema of pure shock and awe takes hold of audiences with a relentless death grip. While each gunshot, detonation and jet roar rattles with a bracing fervour, it’s the flurry of agonizing shrieks and wails that continue to reverberate with a piercing timbre. Garland and Mendoza conjure a soundscape that is as deafening in its moments of silence as in its sequences of explosive action. In operating in such a guttural realm, Warfare taps into a vein of visceral authenticity, where the typical, romantic ideals of valour and gallantry are brutally stripped away, one blood-curdling frame at a time. For as off-putting as Garland and Mendoza’s vision is, it becomes almost impossible to look away, with each suffocating close-up commanding audiences to further immerse themselves in the dizzying form, feel and texture of battle.

Yet, the level of polish in each perfectly squared and staged frame can detract from the utter chaos the film seeks to foster, often feeling too neat and tidy to be the product of a horrific, messy memory. In being a co-directed effort, Garland appears to be injecting too much method to the madness, diluting the instinctual, frenzied ambitions of the film.

This painterly touch also places Warfare in precarious cinematic territory. While audiences can draw for themselves that these battered soldiers, like many non-combatants, are victims of foreign policy and the military-industrial complex, the film never tackles these ideas head-on. While Warfare dials in on a hemmed-in deception of brotherhood under fire, it leaves a lot on the table by not confronting the unjust war that it takes place within — an unfortunate quality exacerbated by the nameless and, often, faceless brown people who find themselves in the squadron’s vicinity and crosshairs.

It all begs the question that if the same film centred on Iraqi insurgents instead of the Navy SEALS, or even Russian soldiers in Ukraine, would such an exercise be permitted, let alone lauded? Many would be eager to label these alternate cinematic endeavours as outright propaganda, but in taking on a familiar Western perspective, Warfare erroneously hopes to sidestep these glaring issues.

Regardless of whether viewers find themselves on opposite sides of the debate, the shadow looms heavily over Garland and Mendoza’s film, blemishing what is otherwise a bone-chilling, painfully authentic cinematic experiment. While Warfare understands that the human cost of its titular act often goes in vain, it succumbs to the same kind of American exceptionalism that not only fuelled the invasion of Iraq but many such unjust wars.