War­fare review – war, what is it good for?

In 2008, with the Sec­ond Gulf War ongo­ing, HBO aired the minis­eries Gen­er­a­tion Kill, based on the book writ­ten by Rolling Stone cor­re­spon­dent Evan Wright fol­low­ing his time embed­ded with a group of US Marines dur­ing the inva­sion of Iraq five years pre­vi­ous. The series, which starred Alexan­der Skars­gård and James Ran­sone among its ensem­ble cast, was well-received crit­i­cal­ly but most­ly for­got­ten, air­ing dur­ing the Gold­en Age of tele­vi­sion dom­i­nat­ed by Lost, Mad Men and Break­ing Bad. Per­haps the vis­cer­al, hyper­mas­cu­line world of Gen­er­a­tion Kill – in which young men tossed slurs back and forth at each oth­er, detailed their bod­i­ly func­tions like small chil­dren and referred to Iraqis almost exclu­sive­ly in sub­hu­man terms – felt a lit­tle too real at the time.

In a review for Slate, Troy Pat­ter­son claimed ​“It plays like it’s been built for anti­so­cial boys – arm­chair heroes in love with guns and in search of dement­ed adven­ture.” (The minis­eries was direct­ed by Susan­na White and Simon Cel­lan Jones.) Per­haps it’s the gift of hind­sight, giv­en what we know now about the Iraq War and the atroc­i­ties that took place at every lev­el of com­mand, but it’s hard to agree with Patterson’s sug­ges­tion that Gen­er­a­tion Kill paints the US Marine Corps as aspi­ra­tional. It’s eight hours of tri­al by fire, watch­ing as men – some bare­ly out of their teens – slow­ly lose the will to live, all while act­ing out west­ern impe­ri­al­ist orders. Gen­er­a­tion Kill came and went. The Sec­ond Gulf War last­ed until 2011.

For those famil­iar with Gen­er­a­tion Kill, watch­ing Alex Gar­land and Ray Mendoza’s War­fare might evoke a sense of déjà vu. Like the minis­eries, War­fare is based on first-hand accounts (this time from Navy SEALs) who fought in the Iraq War. Men­doza, one of those vet­er­ans, met Gar­land while he was shoot­ing Civ­il War, act­ing as an advi­sor for the film’s cli­mac­tic White House infil­tra­tion scene (through his com­pa­ny, ​‘War Office Pro­duc­tions’, Men­doza has also worked on Mark Wahlberg action films Mile 22 and Lone Sur­vivor). Gar­land was so tak­en with Men­doza that the pair teamed up fol­low­ing Civ­il War to make a more vis­cer­al project: one based on a dis­as­trous inci­dent in Rama­di in 2006, where sev­er­al SEALs end­ed up griev­ous­ly injured by an ene­my IED. Shot with­in the con­fines of an Iraqi house that the pla­toon com­man­deer as their base of oper­a­tions, Gar­land and Men­doza stretch cin­e­mat­ic ten­sion to its lim­its, cre­at­ing a vio­lent, ear-split­ting war film on the mod­ern front line.

Their ensem­ble cast com­pris­es a ver­i­ta­ble sea of Hol­ly­wood hot prop­er­ty – there’s Charles Melton, Will Poul­ter, Joseph Quinn, Kit Con­nor, Michael Gan­dolfi­ni, Noah Cen­ti­neo, Finn Ben­nett and Cos­mo Jarvis play­ing the broth­ers in arms, with D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai por­tray­ing Men­doza him­self – though it’s large­ly unnec­es­sary to sin­gle any one actor out. They move as a unit, or at the very least in pairs, limbs of a great organ of war, but Kit Con­nor leaves an impres­sion as Tom­my, a bright-eyed new­bie who gets a very swift real­i­ty check. We nev­er learn much about any of the SEALs, which is fine – we don’t have to know them to recog­nise the grav­i­ty and grave­ness of their sit­u­a­tion. (The two Iraqi inter­preters in the unit die quick­ly and vio­lent­ly in the blast.) Like the Marines of Gen­er­a­tion Kill, most of them are just kids with guns. Cor­ralled in a bed­room, the unnamed Iraqi fam­i­ly who own the house cow­er beneath the Amer­i­cans’ gaze.

This is the real­i­ty of war, at least as Men­doza and his com­rades remem­ber it, fil­tered through 20 years of expe­ri­ence and his­to­ry writ­ten by the vic­tors. While it’s under­stand­able that Men­doza and Gar­land wish to pay trib­ute to those who served in the Iraq War through high­light­ing the bru­tal con­di­tions and unwa­ver­ing loy­al­ty that is born in the bow­els of hell, one won­ders what dif­fer­en­ti­ates this film from, say, Black Hawk Down, or Sav­ing Pri­vate Ryan, or Hack­saw Ridge, or The Hurt Lock­er (or Gen­er­a­tional Kill!) or any num­ber of impres­sive­ly mount­ed war films that seek to recre­ate har­row­ing events with impres­sive tech­ni­cal accu­ra­cy and effects (much has been made of War­fare receiv­ing an IMAX release).

The film­mak­ing is raw and tense, with the young cast suit­ably dis­ap­pear­ing into their roles as anony­mous SEALs and the film­mak­ers seek­ing to get as close to real­i­ty as one can get with­out pro­ject­ing lit­er­al body­cam footage of a war zone onto a cin­e­ma screen. The air­field in Hert­ford­shire dou­bling for an Iraqi sub­urb is duti­ful­ly trans­formed; War­fare is absorb­ing, cer­tain­ly, but to what end?

In inter­views Gar­land and Men­doza have remained as vague as pos­si­ble about pol­i­tics (as Gar­land was with Civ­il War) and claim their main goal with War­fare was achiev­ing authen­tic­i­ty, and it’s hard to argue with the truth, even fil­tered through 20 years of mem­o­ry. But what is authen­tic about a war film with­out pol­i­tics? Why are wars fought, if not for pol­i­tics – par­tic­u­lar­ly this war? It’s pos­si­ble to mount the argu­ment that pol­i­tics doesn’t real­ly mat­ter to the sol­diers on the front line, but that omis­sion in itself is a polit­i­cal state­ment. How do young (over­whelm­ing­ly work­ing class) men become indoc­tri­nat­ed into the mil­i­tary indus­tri­al com­plex? Doesn’t a film like War­fare – impres­sive­ly bru­tal and bloody as it is – func­tion­al­ly reduce com­bat to a Call of Duty cut scene if it refus­es to engage with the why and how of it all?

These are not ques­tions that Gar­land and Men­doza seem inclined to engage with either on or off-screen, pre­sum­ably down­play­ing the polit­i­cal impli­ca­tions lest they alien­ate either side of the spec­trum. The song remains the same: war is hell. At the same time War­fare releas­es loud and proud, Pres­i­dent Trump strips US vet­er­ans of their ben­e­fits and threat­ens Pres­i­dent Zelen­skyy over Ukraine’s future while images of Pales­tini­ans blown apart by IDF weapons par­tial­ly fund­ed by the Amer­i­can and British gov­ern­ments sit on social media next to Tik­Tok dances and Elon Musk memes. The uni­verse expands ever outwards.