Monday, 21 April 2025

Dead ends: "Warfare"


Like a general plotting dominion, Alex Garland advanced his fledgling directorial career several steps with last year's A24 hit Civil War: grabby, discourse-priming subject matter (the sudden collapse of liberal American democracy) wedded to some technical facility, released in that quiet moment between awards season's end and the arrival of the summer blockbusters. This year, Garland brings us Warfare, which seeks to repeat that trick, albeit while operating within greatly more specific territory. In this case, inspiration has been provided by the vivid combat memories of former Navy SEAL (and Warfare's credited co-director) Ray Mendoza, whom Garland hired as an action co-ordinator on his previous film. O
nce more, a Garland title tempts in wavering cinemagoers with the promise they'll see action; once more, the aim is to immerse those viewers in a fraught environment where the threat is multidirectional. (The gamer in Garland continues to sit close to the surface of his films, for better or worse.) In this case, however, the landscape isn't that of a crumbling empire, rather a single block around one Iraqi family's home, seized and briefly occupied by US forces during the second Gulf War. Those forces are represented here by yahoo kids, introduced hooting and hollering to the aerobics-porn of Eric Prydz's era-establishing "Call on Me" promo, and recognisable as a grab bag of familiar faces from the UK and US film industries (Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn, with the young Canadian star of Hulu's Reservation Dogs, D'Pharoah Woon-A-Tai, cast as Mendoza himself). They emerge an hour and a half later as our bloodied and in some cases fallen heroes, their mission having gone first slightly and then hellishly awry.

For Garland and Mendoza, there are only two states in war: either the combatant is bored out of their mind (in retrospect, the good times) or shit-scared and being shot at. Warfare first lays out the banal point detail of this squadron's latest surveillance task, inviting soldier and cinemagoer alike to bide their time and keep their eyes open; around the half-hour, however, they and we fall subject to the one threat nobody successfully saw coming. And that's effectively it: the rest is grisly fallout, a kickbollock scramble to drag yourself and anybody else in your immediate vicinity away from this soot-blackened and shellshocked milieu, under near-constant gunfire, with whatever remains of your life. It's Thursday afternoon CCF practice in Dolby surround sound; it's Black Hawk Down from a distributor with a sideline in tote bags. Someone as pop-culturally savvy as Garland might well have pitched it as the movie equivalent of a three-minute, quiet-quiet-loud rock song. The quiet is unnerving; the loud - be that from grenades, gunfire in confined spaces, desperate radio comms, bullets bouncing off the outside of a Bradley tank or merely the agonised screaming that soundtracks the entire second half - is little short of deafening. Garland kept a close finger and thumb on the volume of the discourse Civil War was constructed to generate; here, he's promoted himself to twiddling the actual volume knobs and dials, the better to generate the precise effects he wants. He's not especially gung ho or gleeful about this; only a complete dunderhead would be, given the scenes coming out of Ukraine and Gaza on a daily basis. For much of its duration, Warfare proves as muted as its soundtrack after a fateful IED detonates. Stunned, scared and scarred faces pass disbelievingly before our gaze; a severed leg sits permanently outside the family home, becoming as familiar in its lifelessness as any welcome mat. Good luck to any cinemas playing those swish Army and Navy recruitment ads before the feature presentation.

The big question, to paraphrase Edwin Starr, is what all this heavy-calibre, high-precision, ultra-choreographed carnage leaves us with. Chiefly, I think, it's an understanding of how powerful those bootcamps training our actors in military verisimilitude have become - how they've now become an arms industry in themselves, lobbying for greater screentime. That's what's really being advertised here, and that's why Garland makes the otherwise utterly nullifying choice to show his actors palling around with their offscreen analogues under Warfare's closing credits. (You can almost hear the voiceover: "Have you been injured in a wildly unpopular, electorally disastrous overseas incursion? Are you looking to recreate a wildly unpopular, electorally disastrous overseas incursion? Then come on down to Mendoza's World of Pain.") If there's anything we can cling to and console ourselves with, it's the sight of these men working together, watching one another's backs and going the extra mile for the team; it's a demonstration of that camaraderie and fellow feeling you may well need to get out of tight spots like this, and which military veterans recall with vastly more fondness than that time Chad got his extremities blown off. We again get a sense Garland really, truly wants to be considered one of those muscular directors like Michael Mann or Oliver Stone - men's men who've weaponised their cameras in the service of fomenting tension, action or some other state of agitation - but that his own weak material keeps letting him down. Civil War was a statement without politics, or at best offering only the most mealy-mouthed of politics; Warfare is a visibly well-drilled and much-rehearsed yet oddly self-contained anecdote, a Desert Storm in a teacup that has to make a succession of loud noises to try and jolt us past its almost entirely localised impact. If we emerge with low-level tinnitus and nausea all the same, that's because something of the Iraq conflict's myriad traumas has been passed on, first from Mendoza to Garland, then by Garland to us. You can argue that trauma was communicated briskly, effectively and most of all accurately here; you'll emerge knowing exactly what it is to hold in a brother's guts while preventing yourself from throwing up. You could also argue the movies really owe us more than this, now more than ever, and you'd take no return fire whatsoever from these quarters.

Warfare is now showing in cinemas nationwide.

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