Directed By Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza

Starring – D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis

The Plot – Embeds audiences with a platoon of American Navy SEALs on a surveillance mission gone wrong in insurgent territory. A boots-on-the-ground story of modern warfare and brotherhood, told in real time and based on the memory of the people who lived it.

Rated R for intense war violence and bloody/grisly images, and adult language throughout.

Warfare | Official Trailer HD | A24

POSITIVES

If Garland’s “Civil War” represented the post-apocalyptic inevitability of the American landscape, “Warfare” feels like the full-on transcendence into hell, with a gut-punching insight into the memories of our greatest heroes unearthing the grippingly nightmarish realities of war that so many of our citizens thankfully never have to experience because of them. As to where that previous film dealt more with the politics and policies of the wedge that continuously divides our society, this is very much a good old-fashioned war film that persists entirely within its most devastatingly lethal clutches, where Garland and his production get to expressively immerse us in the unpredictable atmospheres meant to intentionally terrify and overwhelm an audience in ways that a mask-wearing, knife-wielding psychopath simply never could. Most immaculate here is the amplification and articulation towards the movie’s sound design, both in the echoing proximities and velocities of never-ending ammunition continuously whizzing by our soldiers, but also in the boldly blanketing trance of shell-shock, with all of the cluttered incoherence between character interactions that articulates a long-standing aftershock that persists long after our characters have at least temporarily evaded the clutches of their surrounding adversaries. Combine this with David J. Thompson’s smoothly cerebral style of cinematography, complete with claustrophobically condensed framing and surveilling choreography in motions, and you have an authentic factor for the engagement that definitely feels vividly unlocked from the mind of a soldier who experienced everything shown, and with one of the game’s most talented and fearless directors in Garland assisting him along the way, Mendoza gets us perhaps closer to war-torn realities than any film before it, with a chorus of chaos from outsider enemies that feel like it could collapse the movie’s single stage setting at any moment. On top of this, in being a film about the inescapable depths of despair and devastation, “Warfare” also brings with it all of the carnage of war, with some believably gruesome make-up and special effects designs that bare witness to the permanent costs that war plays to the human anatomy. This is where the film earns every inch of its coveted R-rating, as the blood and gore to everything from lacerations to amputations each bring with them a horrifying magnitude that effectively triggers the overwhelming odds of these guys making it out of their situation, yet simultaneously never with the kind of exploitative reliance on the movie’s imagery that artistically glorifies the perils of character paralysis. Instead, the presentation is quite meticulous in its usage of what’s shown, saving those stomach-churning moments for times when they command the strongest traumatic enveloping, and though they eventually spring with inescapable consequence that made me squirm in my seat, the aforementioned impulses of the photography refuses to revel in the plights of their peril, instead utilizing them at times where they accompany the film’s evolving dramatics in ways that seamlessly marry urgency and vulnerability accordingly. As for the story, I had hits and misses with regards to the ambitious and unambitious directions that the script takes, however I can say that the engagement does a remarkable job towards maintaining interests within the movie’s pacing, especially once the proverbial shit does in fact hit the fan, at around the movie’s half hour mark. As to where a single stage setting could detrimentally condemn audience interests within the evolution of the 90-minute story, I feel that here it only added to the dramatic tension of this group of soldiers continuously holding their own against such an enclosing entity, with each of them physically and psychologically conflicted by the eventual limits that seemingly catch up to each of them, all the while crafting these scintillatingly captivating situations that effortlessly transfix you in the overbearing paranoia of paralyzing silence. This makes “Warfare” an experimental film of sorts, similar to the routes that 2018’s “Dunkirk” took, and while that doesn’t always amount to positive results in the returns of the investment, it never has a problem maintaining your attention throughout the difficulties of this assignment, cementing one of the easier engagements that I’ve had this year, where even after 90 minutes, I felt like I could’ve used so much more, which I will allude to later. Lastly, the performances from this ensemble of up-and-comers are quite remarkable in the physicality and emotionality of their respective roles, but a select couple are asked to go above and beyond, particularly those of Joseph Quinn and Will Poulter, who are each outstanding in their portrayals. Poulter is one of the best transformative actors working today, so playing a stone-faced badass is certainly not outside of his realm of possibilities, however it’s the way Poulter signifies psychological trauma during those testing times that hits the loudest with his performance, where confusion and even hopelessness define his character’s turbulent second half, forcing his character’s resiliency to dig deeper if he seeks to make it out of this never-ending nightmare. As for Quinn, he’s the real Stallworth here, as his bone-chilling deliveries maintained emphasis towards the tension of the various sequences that he’s the focal point of, articulating physical heft and overwhelming adversity piercingly in ways that will haunt my audible capacity for days to come.

NEGATIVES

Similar to “Dunkirk”, this is a film that makes the all or nothing decision to center this film around the war itself, rather than the characters giving their lives to it, and where that faulters on the side of problems for my own personal investment to the narrative is in my lack of connection and definition towards a single one of them, which flounders the intended emotional responses of these sequences quite remarkably towards underwhelming returns. While I can certainly watch and enjoy a war movie fine enough without knowing everything about the characters, the barebones illustrations here kept me from investing in them as characters, rather than the acting counterparts who I continuously interpreted them as, and for a brief and standard run time, I wish the script took more time during its opening act to flesh them out in ways that eased some of the adversity in attempting to understand them from merely a name in passing dialogue, requiring me to scale the surroundings in order to understand who died or became injured during such untimely onslaughts. Beyond razor thin characterization, I also wish the script took more time to flesh out an extensive scope towards the ongoing war, as such a condensed, contrite narrative outline here failed to capture the same kind of articulation towards world-building that made it rest in the shadows of the aforementioned “Civil War”, which in itself never quite reached the potential of its own world-building outline. I can wholeheartedly comprehend that Garland owes his complete unblemished focus towards Mendoza’s heralding journey, especially since he’s a man who witnessed so many unspeakable horrors and lived to tell about it, but the film’s opening on-screen text pertaining to the who and what of the mission prove that Garland does have an appreciation for the value in outlining a bigger and more universally meaningful picture, but single stage setting feels like it is dramatically undercutting meaning in the social commentary of this intimate village’s established conflict, and as a result I never quite grasped whether Garland attempted to conjure an anti-war film, or one meant to convey the magnitude of humanity that continuously hangs in the balance of peril, where we all morally represent shades of grey, rather than black and white.

OVERALL
“Warfare” is a powerfully provocative and intensely immersive reminder on the horrors of war, told from the traumatizing perspective of those forever haunted by it. Though the narrative’s focus towards the war rather than the characters keeps audiences at a disadvantage of seeing them as names and observations rather than the living, breathing entities within, the remarkably authentic means of production pertaining to sight and sound is simply spellbinding, and as a result unlocks an unforgettable experience that closely mirrors the mile in the shoes of these heroes than perhaps any war film before it.

My Grade: 8.1 or B