'Warfare': An Iraq War Parable Full of Sound and Fury
Remember that country we invaded?
[Spoilers ahead for Warfare]
It’s weird to think of the Iraq War as a distant memory, but there’s now a generation of young people who only have some vague awareness of it unless it touched their friends or family personally. That’s not a “kids today” gripe; I know I didn’t have a lot of knowledge about Iran-Contra or Operation Desert Storm—events that happened when I was too young to pay attention to the news. But as someone who was in college when the Iraq War began and saw the Bush Administration keep backpedaling on the reasons why American troops were over there (it started as finding weapons of mass destruction then it was Saddam was working with Al-Qaeda then it was to fight them over there so we’re not fighting them over here then it was to bring freedom to the Iraqi people and so on), all my rage flooded back to me watching Warfare. Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland’s movie doesn’t need to be overtly political as it works to convey a single military encounter in Ramadi in November 2006. The politics waft off the battlefield as young men shoot at each other, die in the streets, and we’re left to wonder what exactly this is all for.
The film is based on the experiences of Mendoza and his fellow Navy SEALs in Ramadi. They take up a position in some random Iraqi family’s house (the film wisely never forgets these people exist, periodically cutting back to their angry, horrified faces), they create a sniper’s nest to observe the movement of enemy combatants (which may as well be anybody given the nature of modern warfare), and then they attempt to evacuate when an enemy grenade injures one of the soldiers. It all goes from bad to worse when, during the evacuation, an IED explodes and maims two of the soldiers. From there, the men try to fortify their position while they wait for their fellow unit to come in and aid their retreat.
What makes Warfare feel real isn’t only Mendoza and Garland’s handheld approach or various details in the production, but how stripped down the script is. There are great actors in this cast, but learning the names of individuals, their backstories, or even why this mission “matters” is never the point. It’s all highly experiential, attaching you to the hip of these characters, holding your breath for the inevitable attack, and then seeing how the platoon reacts when the mission goes sideways. The sounds of the gunfire, explosions, and screams echo in our ears to the point where I wonder if anything outside the theatrical experience or a serious home audio system will fully convey the effect Mendoza and Garland are going for.
The director François Truffaut once asserted that it was impossible to make an anti-war film because to show something is to ennoble it. No disrespect to Truffaut, but that sentiment is nonsense, and while there are plenty of supposedly anti-war movies that end up feeling jingoistic and pro-military, you can’t look at something like Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory (1957) or Elem Klimov’s Come and See (1985) and think, “War is awesome, and we should do more of it.” For a movie that came directly from the experiences of Navy SEALs, renowned as one of America’s most elite fighting forces, there’s nothing in Warfare that feels like a recruitment ad or even a celebration of their work. The sense seems to be that they were as well-trained as humanly possible, and then when some unseen guys in a poor village on the other side of the world detonated a bomb, chaos reigned. It’s not so much that the unit becomes unprofessional, but what are you supposed to do when your medic gets his legs blown to bits and is screaming bloody murder at the top of his lungs? What do you do when your commanding officer is so concussed by the blast that he’s struggling to give orders and regroup? If this is what happens to SEALs, how could this possibly be an advertisement for any branch of the military?
If we’re talking about “ennobling,” even here, Warfare seems aware that there may be a brotherhood among these men, but nobility would be a stretch. The film opens with all these guys dancing and singing at the top of their lungs to the “Call on Me” music video, almost swimming in their testosterone as women exercise in an aggressively sexual manner. The guys are still in the moment as they approach their various positions and one soldier uses his rifle to dance and mimic a phallic thrust to another member of the team. These are boys with toys, and while they take their work seriously and have gone through famously intense training, you still have a bunch of guys in their twenties and thirties on the other side of the world carrying out a mission that was supposedly accomplished three years earlier.
Furthermore, this is not a celebration of U.S. military might or know-how despite the soldiers’ training. They’re still stunned after the attack, and even when the other team arrives to help them evacuate, they discover that brass is reluctant to send another tank for rescue because of the IED attack on the previous evacuation attempt. America has far more military might than any other nation on the planet, and yet the solution to this problem was a soldier willing to BS the people on the other end of the radio so he could get his injured teammates to safety. Warfare is a movie where the resources are so vast that soldiers constantly have to risk their safety to recover equipment lest it falls into enemy hands, but the structural support is so anemic that the platoon requires someone levelheaded enough for some lateral thinking in such a frenetic environment.
Warfare seeks to put us in the middle of the action not so we can hero-worship, but to humanize the soldiers and stress that the experience of combat can boil down to improvisation and luck. Watching the film, I was reminded of Peter Berg’s 2013 film Lone Survivor, which plays far more as a hagiography of SEALs. That film is in a tough position because so many soldiers died in that encounter and Berg wants to be respectful, but a large portion of that movie is valorizing the manliness of the individuals. They kill loads of faceless attackers, treat wounds by rubbing dirt on them, and are treated like fallen heroes. Warfare doesn’t crave acknowledgment for heroism or even honor for those who died in battle. Instead, it seeks to put us in the middle of the fog of war and understand that warfare in Iraq in 2006 wasn’t so much about taking and holding positions as much as finding ways out of the quagmire.
Over 20,000 soldiers were wounded in Operation Enduring Freedom and over 2,000 died. The soldiers went where they were supposed to, and carried out the orders they were given, and yet as two tanks wheel out the wounded and battle-scarred members of this platoon, the only accomplishment is survival. That’s no small feat for these men, but it’s also a far cry from the sense of triumph and invincibility that permeated the film’s opening scenes. What was left were body parts in the street, blood-soaked floors, bullet-riddled walls, and the conflict continuing.
Matt, an important commentary on anti-war filming and how dialogue, characterization, story, sound, and visuals can valorize or profoundly critique warfare, especially American style warfare. Seems timely in light of so much ongoing warfare right now in more than Gaza and Ukraine. Thank you!