Warfare: an 'honest' account of brutal engagement in Iraq

Alex Garland's new film "feels like the most honest depiction of modern warfare I can recall seeing", said Robbie Collin in The Telegraph.

Co-written and co-directed by Ray Mendoza, a former US navy Seal (who served as a consultant on Garland's film "Civil War"), it is based on his memories of a real-life incident: a botched engagement in the Iraqi city of Ramadi in about 2006.

In the opening scene, a group of Seals descend on a civilian home in the cover of darkness, terrifying its residents; the men then set up sniper-surveillance positions from which to give cover for a ground operation, and wait.

The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

There's no banter or chat about what they'll do after the war, said Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian: just minutes of silence as they sit in a state of "hyper-alertness". Then, in a flash, disaster strikes, and all is carnage and chaos.

"Warfare" is in some ways similar to the rash of war-on-terror films that came out 20 years ago, such as "The Hurt Locker"; but this film is "almost fierce in its indifference to political or historical context" (a resource that should be "more readily available" two decades on); and there is "almost no conventional narrative progression".

Garland and Mendoza are "concerned only with the overwhelming, sensory journey that is conflict", said Clarisse Loughrey in The Independent. The film is all about the moment: the pain, fear and blood. In this work of "attempted neutrality", there's no musical score to manipulate viewers' emotions; none of the characters have sympathetic backstories. But the violence depicted on screen didn't erupt from nowhere; there was a path to it, and the film feels unmoored without that context.