War movies turn a lot of us into armchair warriors. We’ve seen the great ones, like “Saving Private Ryan” and “Full Metal Jacket” and “Apocalypse Now” and “The Hurt Locker” and “Platoon,” and every one of those films is so vivid and experiential that we may get swept up in the illusion that we now understand something essential about war. But if you’ve ever been close to 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 that soldiers feel toward each other, the unspeakable horror, the insane thrill of it — these are things that movies show us a mere shadow of, things that as civilians we can’t know.
There are filmmakers who fall prey to the illusion too. When “Apocalypse Now” was coming out, Francis Ford Coppola, caught up in the corrosive majesty of his vision, said at the movie’s Cannes Film Festival premiere in 1979, “My film is not a movie. My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam.” That came close to being a poetic point, but on the other hand…no.
You may feel there’s a similar sentiment to Coppola’s at work in “Warfare,” a combat film set during the Iraq War in November 2006. The film was co-directed by Alex Garland, the director of “Civil War” and “Annihilation,” and Ray Mendoza, an Iraq War veteran, and it strives for maximal realism and intensity within a very small scale (that’s part of the realism). “Warfare” is based on real events, and on nothing but the soldiers’ direct memories of those events. It attempts to recreate what happened with the purity of a vérité documentary, aiming for a bloody random transcendent verisimilitude.
The film has no dramatic hooks, no scripted banter, no establishment of plot points, no character development, no giving those of us in the audience our bearings. It simply plunks us down, on a very black and 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, have arrived to help ensure the safe passage of ground forces in the area the next day. The distant echoey machine-gun clatter in the background — the sound design of it — is very “Full Metal Jacket.” The SEALs enter a blockish concrete home, splitting into three groups. Op 1, who we’re following, head to the second story, a self-contained apartment where an Iraqi family lives. The family is frightened, but the soldiers aren’t there to terrorize them. They just need a place in which to hide out and maneuver.
The entire film takes place in, or just outside, that house, and in terms of watching an executed plan of action, not much happens. The first half hour is filled with the weirdly neutral techno jargon of soldiers jabbering code words into their headphones to what I (as a know-nothing) am tempted to call Mission Control. It’s not like the film ever tells us where those voices of authority crackling at the other end are coming from. A command station somewhere, one that’s plugged, almost godlike, into drone surveillance. (The SEALs have their own drone video hookup as well.) One of the key characters, Elliott Miller (Cosmo Jarvis), who with his smirk and mustache resembles a frat-house Freddie Mercury, is the group’s trained sniper, and he sets up his four-foot-long rifle on a table, with a rug underneath it, lying prone as he (and the movie) peer through the gun sight at the Iraqis who are mingling across the street. Most of them are civilians, but he’s scouting for the enemy — for Al Qaeda soldiers. And he sees some. But he doesn’t shoot them.
The opening half hour is all waiting, spying, and sitting around, with occasional minor strategizing. It’s of fairly limited interest, since we have no real idea what the plan is — or who these men are. According to the film’s press notes, “The Op 1 team didn’t know they were next door to an insurgent house.” I didn’t know it either; that’s how sketchy and minimal the film’s flow of information is. But it’s all part of the design. Alex Garland isn’t out to make a “war movie.” Oh no. He wants to show us…warfare. The real thing. Stripped of drama and “shaped” cinematic excitement. The drama, what there is of it, is there in the authenticity.
At last, something happens. The sniper gun is peering through an eight-inch-wide hole blasted into the wall, and the insurgents, having figured out that the Americans are in there, toss a grenade through the hole. It explodes, causing a few wounds (though nothing close to what we’ll see in the film’s second half). Out of this random attack a plan emerges: They’re going to call in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle (what we used to call a tank) to whisk the soldiers out of there. At one point a small cannister is referred to as “smoke,” and I thought: What is that code for? Actually, it means…smoke. When the Bradley arrives, they toss the cannister out the door and it emits blinding plumes, which camouflage the soldiers as they hustle out the door and into the tank.
That’s when the bad thing happens. Just as they’re escaping, right next to the Bradley an IED explodes. What we’ve witnessed so far is the odd bureaucratic preamble to war. Now we see the awfulness of war.
If “Warfare” has a cinematic antecedent, it might be “Black Hawk Down,” the 2001 Ridley Scott movie that dunked us in the fire and shrapnel of a mission gone wrong. That’s a valid thing for a movie to do. Yet the challenge is making it gripping. “Warfare” presents itself as an immersive experience, and I think it will be lauded for being an immersive experience. To me, though, it was not. Watching it, I felt involved and detached at the same time. The film strips itself of most of the active elements that immerse us in a war movie — like, for instance, treating the soldiers as fully colored-in characters. Will Poulter, as the team commander, does his inscrutable noble-scowl thing, and good actors like Charles Melton and Michael Gandolfini make their presence felt, but ultimately we’re standing back and watching them; that’s the downside of the film’s “objective” method. (I actually felt more immersion in the combat scenes of Ang Lee’s unjustly reviled “Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk.”)
“Warfare,” despite what it attempts to bring off, doesn’t portray the existential reality of war in a way that we haven’t seen before. I’d argue that the genius of films like “Saving Private Ryan” and “Full Metal Jacket” is that they’re dramas embedded in a spontaneous vision of flesh-burning violence and fear. The sniper sequence that takes up the last third of “Full Metal Jacket” is, to me, perhaps the greatest sequence Stanley Kubrick ever staged. When Arliss Howard’s Cowboy gets shot and lays there dying, you touch war’s hideous power as much as you do in any film in history.
In “Warfare,” the IED maims two of the soldiers, Elliott and Sam (Joseph Quinn). It’s Sam’s wounds that define the core of the movie. Chunks of his leg have been blasted away, and he lies there, yelling and screaming in pain, for close to half an hour. The film rubs our noses in his agony, as if to say, “You thought a war movie — or war itself — was exciting? Think again.” If you find his suffering hard to watch — well, that’s the idea. Yet I felt on some level as if the movie was using his mortal hell to lecture us.
What’s the grand point of the lecture? “Warfare” feels like one of those films that gets hailed as an “anti-war” movie. Yet what does it mean to be an anti-war movie? Many of us thought that the fundamental decision to attack Iraq was based on an obscene lie, so you can certainly be anti the war that’s depicted here. Many of us thought Vietnam was a metastasizing disaster (the domino theory being played out long after its relevance had expired), so you can be anti the war that’s depicted in all the great Vietnam films. But “Saving Private Ryan,” a movie in which Steven Spielberg derived his diving-into-machine-gun-hell aesthetic from the Vietnam films, was not a movie you could call anti-war, because it was about the war that we all agreed needed to be fought, the war that saved Western Civilization. So the whole “anti-war” thing, at least in my eyes, can never be a universal statement about war.
“Warfare,” you could say, tries to be quite particular. It captures one sliver of experience that unfolded during the Iraq War, and there’s no doubt that it does so with disquieting skill. There are several times when the SEALs call for a “show of force,” and this means that a U.S. fighter jet will zoom, at terrifying speed and centrifugal energy, just over the street, as if it were buzzing cattle. It’s quite an eye-popping sight. Yet I suspect the audience for “Warfare” will be limited, because the film is so “objective” that in a certain way it’s nearly abstract. It scrapes every last bit of romantic glamour off the image of combat, and I guess you could say that’s an achievement. But it’s an achievement, in this case, that seems to be saluting itself.
