A platoon of Navy SEALs embark on a dangerous mission in Ramadi, Iraq, with the chaos and brotherhood of war retold through their memories of the event.

‘Warfare‘, Alex Garland’s latest movie is an intense war drama, co-directed with actual Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza and based on the experiences of him and his fellow U.S. soldiers in Iraq during the mid-2000s war. It plays out largely in real time and focuses on one specific incident, where a house they are using as a stakeout comes under heavy bombardment from local militias who discover it’s being used by the Americans. Devoid of much scene setting, it plainly shows a historically accurate (as far as I understand) depiction of how men under heavy bombardment behave when trying to keep each other alive and enact a rescue mission.

There are a few familiar faces in the cast but it isn’t star led by any stretch, and that helps with the immersion into the story which kicks off in earnest as soon as the title appears on the screen after a brief introductory prelude. Once we’re into the real time element, it is over an hour of tension and urban warfare where the soldiers are only partially aware of where the enemy is, even with the advanced technology and air support at their disposal. From a technical standpoint this is really superbly made, with a tight 90 minute running time and brilliantly directed action sequences that put you right in the middle of the action. Despite the chaos unfolding, you almost always have a sense of what is going on and it’s fascinating seeing how different individuals respond, with the best training in the world coming up against raw human nature.

Very few movies have effectively shown the difficulty or even the folly of fighting in an urban environment such as this, whether that is the intention or not. As ‘Warfare’ shows things entirely from the point of view of the U.S. military, it will undoubtedly be called propaganda in some quarters (and to a degree, understandably so), but I think, like ‘Civil War’, Garland’s last film which received criticism from right and left, it tries to be as apolitical as it is possible to be by displaying what this situation would have been like for the men on the ground without getting into a debate about the rights and wrongs of whether they should have been in this situation in the first place. Leave that for the audience at home to judge from the wealth of information about this war already available and reported on over the last 20 years.

‘Warfare’ is an impressively made war movie that brings together Mendoza’s real life experiences and Garland’s filmmaking craft to make for an engrossing watch.

Rating: 4/5

Directed By: Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza

Starring: Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Kit Connor, Finn Bennett, Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton, Noah Centineo and Michael Gandolfini

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt31434639/