Warfare (Photo – A24)
Warfare, a film based on soldiers’ memories of the Iraq war, is full of suspense, action, but not of resolution.
Warfare
Directed by S Ray Mendoza; Alex Garland – 2025
Reviewed by Garrett Rowlan
Stripped of any major stars, the film is bracketed in 90 minutes of real-time events, involving a dozen or so soldiers who are surrounded and trying to escape.
Despite its production values—shot in England but convincingly recreating the mean streets of Ramadi—the film adopts a minimalist approach, devoid of historical context. No one asks, “What are we doing here?”
That question was once posed by the surrealism of Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, set in another war, another place. It’s a question that subsequent films about later conflicts—Black Hawk Down, Three Kings, The Hurt Locker—don’t even bother to ask.
We’ve given up on the idea—if we ever entertained it—that we intervene at the behest of the best and the brightest. An idea made almost laughable by Vietnam, and hardly refuted by the invasions that followed. In the film’s opening minutes, the same soldiers who will soon be under attack are shown worked into a lust—or bloodlust—by a workout video featuring scantily clad women. If “What are we doing here?” is the question, that’s the best the movie offers as an answer: a woman in Iraq asking why, near the film’s end, as her home is being destroyed.
What is left, and what the film depicts with unflinching realism, is a band of brothers united in a common cause: their own need for survival.
> Playing at Landmark Pasadena Playhouse, IPIC Theatres, Regal Edwards Alhambra Renaissance, AMC Santa Anita 16, AMC Atlantic Times Square 14, and Regal UA La Canada.
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