Film Review: Warfare
‘American foreign policy is horrendous 'cause not only will America come to your country and kill all your people,’ said Frankie Boyle, ‘but what's worse, I think, is that they'll come back 20 years later and make a movie about how killing your people made their soldiers feel sad.’
Almost 20 years after the event depicted in Warfare, the opening shots place a platoon of Navy SEALs in front of a computer screen as they whoop and holler to Eric Prydz’s Call on Me video, a gyrating-leotard throwback to 1985’s Curtis/Travolta hit movie, Perfect.
Back when Perfect hit cinemas, US President Ronald Reagan was helping Iraqi leader Sadaam Hussein in his war with Iran; this time around—in the ever-shifting sands of US geomeddling—Hussein is persona non grata, and the platoon we see is the platoon we’re dropped into Ramadi with, armed only with the knowledge that it’s 2006, and they’re there on a mission to support US Marines.
As both a stylistic and narrative choice, filmmakers Alex Garland and Iraqi war veteran, Ray Mendoza, invert the telescope: they dispense with macro considerations of casus belli and— bucking Boyle’s complaint—spare us any post hoc hand-wringing about the adverse psychological effects American soldiers faced by taking part in wars.
What we’re left with is a slice-of-life moment in time. In keeping with the bare-bones theme, there’s no score. So, when we pitch up with the SEALs in the dead of night as they commandeer a ground-level home, and then sledgehammer their way through a brick wall to access the upper-level apartment, things are quiet and tense. With the families corralled and sequestered in a back room, it’s down to business.
But what business? Nobody is looking at polaroids of their gal-back-home; nobody is gelling, band-of-brothers style, for a noble cause in spite of obvious ethnic differences. There’s virtually no character development.
It’s mostly breaker-breaker radio natter between a sniper—who’s propped himself up on bedding to better aim his fuck-off rifle through a hole bored through the side of this family’s home—to some 2-D uniforms downstairs, who then relay what the sniper has seen to commanding officers off screen. To pierce the boredom, one guy does pushups. Another guy mills about looking nonplussed.
Through the rifle’s scope, we see men in headscarves alight on a building across from the platoon. They arrive slowly, at first, but when more arrive we know something’s afoot. A well-lobbed grenade plops through the sniper’s hole and kickstarts the action.
The platoon is forced downstairs, where they call for backup to evacuate the guys with minor casualties. When the tank arrives, the escaping platoon trips an IED and triggers some serious disembowelment, at which point the film alternates between actual screaming and silent screaming in the smoky, slo-mo aftermath. It’s quite visceral. No more so than when one soldier—having dragged his mate back inside the house—tries in vain to tourniquet above an Eton Mess of former legs.
In line with convention, the rest of the film treads a familiar will-they-won’t-they path as the platoon waits on (reluctant) tanks to return and successfully extricate them from peril. Spoiler alert: they make it.
According to Warfare’s prologue, ‘[t]his film uses only their memories’. Maybe it should have been left there.