Since the dawn of cinema, Hollywood has both glamorised war and at the same time tried to capture the brutality of it. It was Francois Truffaut that said “there is no such thing as an anti-war film”, and although there are some cases where this is not true, Truffaut’s quote is mostly accurate. Even seeing the brutality of war it’s still thrilling and exciting and you want to root for the heroes to kill the villains. Here in Alex Garland & Ray Mendoza’s Warfare, the film tries its hardest to shy away from the glamorisation of Hollywood, and also circumvents traditional narrative structure to show the pointlessness of war and does almost succeed in its goals.

In Warfare, in the war in Iraq a team of Navy SEALs occupy a families home during the night to stake out a plaza opposite the following day. Later on they are ambushed and their means of escape is foiled, leaving the team with two seriously injured men and the enemy closing in. The structure of the film is interesting because there are bucket-loads of tension in that first 30 minutes where they’re just waiting around, and you know something is going to happen but you just don’t know when. To have that long early segment of waiting shows how boring war can be, just waiting and waiting for something to happen, and then when it does it’s terrifying. Once the inciting incident happens and one of the characters gets injured it becomes such an uncomfortable film, the guttural screams of the injured character cuts straight through you, leaving you squirming in your seat. It certainly is effective in telling me I would make a horrendous soldier and I’m very happy to just be sitting in the cinema watching this, not actually living it.

The story is based off first time director Ray Mendoza’s actual memory of the situation, and whilst that is a fascinating brief for a film I don’t think it works quite as well on the screen. So many aspects that could’ve been tightened up that weren’t because of this dogma of memory they were going for. Also as a result of this there is next to no character development, you barely know the characters names throughout the film and this holds the film back from reaching the heights of Garland’s previous films. They do have some of the best young actors in Hollywood right now though, Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, the list goes on and on, I wouldn’t be surprised if multiple of these men who worked on this go on to win Oscars and you look back in many years time and think ‘wow these guys were all in the same film?’.

I must say, that sound design is utterly phenomenal. I saw this in a Dolby sound cinema screen and your chair shakes when the bombs go off simply because of the sheer volume. When the bullets are shot you feel it in your bones, and when the jet flies by it’s ear piercing. It’s an incredible achievement in sound design and is one of the reasons why this film feels so real. The practical effects and make-up of the injuries is amazing too, makes you feel nauseous when you see the extent of the injuries of a certain character.

Overall I think this is a strong exercise in filmmaking, but to me it is more of a reconstruction than an actual proper narrative film. The world in which they have made is very believable, and it certainly is on its way to constituting an ‘anti-war film’ with the bleak ending. I would be interested to see if Ray Mendoza does direct again, and if Alex Garland sticks to his word when he said this would be his final directorial film.