It captures a small part of the lived experience of the Iraq War, and does so with unsettling skill. However, it lacks drama and a cinematic "cast" emotion, so you can feel both involved and detached.
War movies turn many of us into armchair warriors. We've seen the greats, like "Saving Private Ryan," "Full Metal Jacket," "Apocalypse Now," "The Hurt Locker," and "Platoon," and each one is so vivid and experiential that we can fall into the illusion that we now understand something essential about war. But if you've ever been around someone who's been in a war, the first thing you know is that you know nothing about it. Literally, nothing. The chaos and terror, the spiritual and physical loyalty soldiers feel for one another, the indescribable horror, the insane thrill it entails—these are things movies show us only a glimpse of, things we, as civilians, can't possibly know.
Directors: Alex Garland, Ray Mendoza
Writers: Ray Mendoza, Alex Garland
Stars: D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis
However, there are also filmmakers who fall prey to illusion. When "Apocalypse Now" was released, Francis Ford Coppola, captivated by the corrosive majesty of his vision, said at the film's premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in 1979: "My film is not a film. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam." That bordered on poetry, but on the other hand... no.
Perhaps a similar sentiment to Coppola's can be sensed in "War," a combat film set during the Iraq War in November 2006. The film was co-directed by Alex Garland, director of "Civil War" and "Annihilation," and Ray Mendoza, an Iraq War veteran, and strives for maximum realism and intensity on a very small scale (that's part of realism). "War" is based on real events, and solely on the soldiers' direct recollections of those events. It attempts to recreate what happened with the purity of a true documentary, seeking transcendent, bloody, and random verisimilitude.
The film lacks dramatic hooks, predefined dialogue, plot reference points, character development, or orientation for the audience. It simply places us, on a dark, silent night, in an empty residential neighborhood in Ramadi Province, Iraq, where a team of Navy SEALs, along with two Iraqi scouts and two Marines, has arrived to help ensure the safe passage of ground forces in the area the next day. The distant, echoing roar of machine guns in the background—the sound design—is very much in the vein of "Full Metal Jacket." The SEALs enter a concrete house, splitting into three groups. Agent 1, whom we follow, heads to the second floor, a self-contained apartment where an Iraqi family lives. The family is scared, but the soldiers aren't there to terrorize them. They just need a place to hide and maneuver.
The entire film takes place inside or outside that house, and as far as observing an executed plan of action goes, not much happens. The first half hour is filled with the strangely neutral techno-speak of soldiers muttering code words into headsets to what I (as an ignoramus) am tempted to call Mission Control. The film doesn't tell us where these authoritative voices crackling on the other end are coming from. From a command station somewhere, connected, almost godlike, to drone surveillance. (The SEALs also have their own drone video link.) One of the key characters, Elliott Miller (Cosmo Jarvis), who with his grin and mustache resembles a frat-boy Freddie Mercury, is the group's expert sniper. He sets up his five-foot rifle on a table, with a mat underneath, lying face down while he (and the film) peer through the scope at the Iraqis mingling across the street. Most are civilians, but he's looking for the enemy, al-Qaeda soldiers. And he sees some. But he doesn't shoot them.
The first half hour is spent waiting, spying, and waiting, with occasional minor strategy. It's of little interest, since we have no idea what the plan is or who these men are. According to the film's press notes, "The Operation 1 team didn't know they were next to an insurgent house." I didn't know either; that's how vague and minimalist the film's flow of information is. But it's all part of the design. Alex Garland isn't trying to make a "war movie." No! He wants to show us... war. The real thing. Stripped of drama and with cinematic emotion "cast in." The drama, what there is of it, lies in the authenticity.
Finally, something happens. The sniper rifle peers through a twenty-centimeter-wide hole in the wall, and the insurgents, discovering the Americans are there, throw a grenade through the hole. It explodes, causing a few injuries (though nothing like a fatality).
That's when the bad stuff happens. Just as they escape, an improvised explosive device explodes right next to the Bradley. What we've witnessed so far is the strange bureaucratic preamble to war. Now we see the horror of war.
If "Warfare" has a cinematic precedent, it might be "Black Hawk Down," Ridley Scott's 2001 film that immersed us in the fire and shrapnel of a failed mission. It's valid for a film to do that. However, the challenge is making it captivating. "Warfare" presents itself as an immersive experience, and I think it will be praised for being so. For me, however, it wasn't. Watching it, I felt both involved and detached. The film strips away most of the active elements that immerse us in a war movie, such as treating the soldiers as completely colored characters. Will Poulter, as the team commander, displays his inscrutable and noble scowl, and fine actors like Charles Melton and Michael Gandolfini make their presence felt, but ultimately, we're left watching from the sidelines; that's the downside of the film's "objective" method. (In fact, I felt more immersed in the combat scenes of Ang Lee's unfairly panned "Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk.")
"Warfare," despite what it tries to convey, doesn't portray the existential reality of war in a way we've never seen before. I'd argue that the genius of films like "Saving Private Ryan" and "Full Metal Jacket" lies in the fact that they are dramas embedded in a spontaneous vision of harrowing violence and fear. The sniper sequence that occupies the final third of "Full Metal Jacket" is, for me, perhaps the greatest sequence ever assembled by Stanley Kubrick. When Arliss Howard's Cowboy is shot and lies dying, the horrific power of war is felt as much as in any film in history.
In "Warfare," the IED maims two soldiers, Elliott and Sam (Joseph Quinn). It's Sam's wounds that define the film's essence. Pieces of his leg have been blown off, and he lies there, screaming in pain, for nearly half an hour. The film shoves his agony in our faces, as if to say, "You thought a war movie, or war itself, was exciting? Think again." If you struggle with his suffering, well, that's the point. Yet, in a way, I felt as if the film was using his mortal hell to lecture us.
What's the big message here? "Warfare" seems like one of those films that hails itself as "anti-war." But what does it mean to be an anti-war film? Many of us thought the fundamental decision to attack Iraq was based on an obscene lie, so one can certainly be against the war depicted here. Many of us thought Vietnam was a disaster that spilled over (the domino theory that developed long after its relevance had expired), so one can be against the war depicted in all the great Vietnam movies. But "Saving Private Ryan," a film in which Steven Spielberg drew his dive-into-machine-gun-hell aesthetic from Vietnam movies, wasn't a film you could call anti-war, because it was about the war we all agreed had to be fought, the war that saved Western civilization. So the whole "anti-war" thing, at least in my opinion, can never be a universal statement about war.
"Warfare," you might say, tries to be quite particular. It captures a small part of the experience that unfolded during the Iraq War, and there's no doubt that it does so with disturbing skill. There are several instances where the SEALs demand a "show of force," meaning that a U.S. fighter jet will whiz by, at terrifying speed and centrifugal energy, right across the street, as if it were whizzing cattle. It's an impressive sight. However, I suspect that the audience for "Warfare" will be limited, because the film is so "objective" that, in a way, it's almost abstract. It strips away every last trace of romantic glamour from the combat image, and I suppose you could call that an achievement. But it's an achievement, in this case, that seems to pay homage to itself.
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