Uncinematic Visions of War

Evan Hill finds himself mired down in Alex Garland’s “Warfare.”

By Evan HillJune 13, 2025

• Film

• Politics

IN 1973, François Truffaut offered what remains the pithiest observation about so-called “anti-war” movies when film critic and interviewer Gene Siskel asked the French New Wave director why there was such a lack of violence in his work. Truffaut replied that he found “that violence is very ambiguous in movies. For example, some films claim to be antiwar, but I don’t think I’ve really seen an antiwar film. Every film about war ends up being pro-war.” Violence excites viewers in a primal way, and war is an alluring spectacle to the uninvolved observer, an activity whose awesome terror and intensity bleeds through even to someone watching from afar.

Art about war cannot help but invoke these primeval feelings from a safe distance, and the big screen romanticizes nearly everything it depicts. The war film audience roots for the soldiers to defeat the enemy or at least make it out alive; the violence they inflict is salvific. A truly anti-war film, it follows, would have to show war not as a primal and inevitable contest to be heroically survived but as a senseless choice. Or perhaps it wouldn’t show the war at all.

The question of whether such a thing is possible is put to the test again in British director Alex Garland’s new film Warfare, a day-in-the-life story of the Iraq War. Co-directed with US Navy SEAL veteran and previous Garland collaborator Ray Mendoza, Warfare forensically recreates a real-life shoot-out with insurgents that left two SEALs maimed and two Iraqi interpreters dead in 2006. Made in no small part as an act of cathartic therapy for the real-life SEAL team involved in the incident, among them Mendoza himself, Warfare pledges ultimate fealty to reality. But unlike other films of the War on Terror era, it ultimately finds nothing worth saying beneath the facsimile, in the end reverting to an absolution that rings false after 90 minutes of horror.

Garland has made a point of situating Warfare and its predecessor, last year’s Civil War, in the lineage of Elem Klimov’s Come and See, a Soviet World War II movie released in 1985, favorably citing it as “one of the few genuinely, deeply, profoundly anti-war films” and one that avoids the common trap of rendering war even mildly seductive or glamorous. Come and See, both brilliant and sickening, depicts the savagery that confronts a boy who joins anti-German partisans in Nazi-occupied Belarus. When my friend and colleague, a Ukrainian American video editor, took our reporting team to see a restoration at Film Forum in 2020, we left the showing in stunned silence, unable even to lighten the mood with a macabre joke in the wake of such disturbing imagery.

But Warfare exists in a new and different cycle of movies, an important subgenre of war film made in the shadow of 9/11. Some of these War on Terror films are fluff, while others are xenophobic and jingoistic, echoed in television shows such as Homeland (2011–20) and 24 (2001–10). Many are ostensibly serious-minded yet essentially propagandistic. A small number, such as Kathryn Bigelow’s films The Hurt Locker (2008) and Zero Dark Thirty (2012), ask to be taken more seriously, emphasizing both the absence of catharsis to be found in contemporary war and a new type of gritty, near-documentary realism. They have something to say behind the realistically rendered violence—about combat’s drug-like rush or the illusory crusade of the War on Terror—but offer a new kind of seduction by ostensibly showing us combat and war as it “really is.” Mendoza was Garland’s military adviser on Civil War, which features several of its own intense combat sequences, and one can sense in Warfare an almost boyish awe with war and an obsession with honoring its participants by rendering it in stark, realistic detail. Yet unlike its most significant contemporaries, Warfare insists until its final moments that at the center of war’s maelstrom lies a void.

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The setting is November 2006 in the city of Ramadi, the capital of Iraq’s Anbar Governorate, and for most of the war, the center of both the Sunni extremist insurgency and the “awakening” that rose up to drive them out. The protagonists are members of Navy SEAL Team 5, who sneak into a civilian house in the middle of the night to obtain a position to surveil the streets the next day. They are performing overwatch for marines whom we never see, executing a mission we never learn.

The story is based on real events during what would become known as the Battle of Ramadi, when the US military cordoned off the city in the hope of finally ridding it of insurgents. But the action is isolated from any context. There are no preening politicians or vainglorious general officers to whom we might comfortably assign blame for the pain soon to be meted out to the soldiers on-screen. We barely learn their names. It’s just another day in a war without greater meaning.

For all the SEALs’ elite stealth, insurgents learn of their position and slip a grenade through a hole in the wall being used by one of the SEAL snipers, Elliott Miller (Cosmo Jarvis). Then they assault the American position. The SEALs quickly follow the playbook for US troops under heavy fire, calling in air support and immediate evacuation. But their escape attempt is horrifically foiled when an improvised explosive device (IED) detonates just as they are fleeing. The explosion kills two Iraqi interpreters and seriously wounds two SEALs, including Miller, whose legs are rendered mangled sticks of flesh.

The SEALs’ day is one of boredom pierced by terror and suffering. The screams of Miller and his wounded fellow soldier, Sam (Joseph Quinn), are painfully endless, sucking up the movie’s soundscape. Much of the action, rendered with the handheld camera and washed-out palette we have come to expect from 21st-century war films, is spent in one room, lingering over the grievously wounded men and the specifics of their injuries. It’s hard to think of another movie that has so intensely observed the suffering of American troops.

Garland also gives attention to the family of Iraqi civilians whom the SEALs have detained in their own ground-floor bedroom. A mother, a father, a son, and two daughters, their lives have been thrown into chaos by the American invaders. The SEALs are neither sadistic nor particularly caring toward these innocents: they shield them from US fire they’ve called in but couldn’t care less about turning their home into a charnel house and ordering armored vehicles to blast away its second floor. The two Iraqi interpreters, blown to pieces by the IED, are not afforded the same grace by either the SEALs or Garland. The film forgets them.

Eventually, the SEALs stabilize the wounded soldiers and receive reinforcements. Bradley Fighting Vehicles return to rescue them, blasting away at the surrounding houses with their 25 mm M242 Bushmaster chain guns. (These scenes are impossible, these days, not to associate with real-life images of Israeli troops leveling Gazan homes with tanks over the past 19 months.) The soldiers escape into the vehicles, the ramps go up, and the Bradleys roll away.

As the dust settles and the roar of the departing armored vehicles recedes, the camera lingers on a suddenly, eerily quiet street. Out of the houses, a dozen insurgents cautiously emerge. The Americans are gone; they’re still there. Men on both sides have been irreversibly maimed or killed. Inside the shattered family home just abandoned by the SEALs, the father reassures his daughters that it’s safe to come out. The floor is as blood-streaked as a slaughterhouse. For around 90 of its 95-minute run time, Warfare has nearly met Truffaut’s challenge, unapologetically serving up horrors and offering a rare portrayal of the Iraq War that refuses to give Americans the last word.

Then something odd happens: the song “Dancing and Blood” from Low’s Double Negative (2018) begins to play, and the film segues into a coda that shatters this delicate withholding of closure. The words “For Elliott” appear on-screen, a dedication to the wounded sniper played by Jarvis, followed by a second dedication to the Bradley team that rescued the SEALs. Still images of the squad’s actual members, their faces blurred, fade in and out next to those of the actors who played them, dressed in military costume. Intercut is documentary footage of Garland and Mendoza (depicted by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai in the film) teaching the actors tactical maneuvers and plotting camera angles. Miller himself, who lost his legs and the ability to speak, and who uses a text-to-speech program, rolls up to Jarvis and others in his wheelchair and is greeted with smiles. “I didn’t think you were gonna make it,” someone says happily.

We are no longer in Ramadi but a realistically rendered soundstage, and the movie, thus far willing to let the trauma speak for itself, explains with these images that the Americans who fought that day should be honored, and that they have also processed and made peace with what happened to them. Warfare seems proud to show the audience how hard it has worked to render their worst agony with greatest accuracy. The effect is that of a pleasing funeral elegy for someone who has died violently.

Warfare cannot be accused of taking violence lightly, and in many ways puts to shame lighter War on Terror fare like the action figure playtime of 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi (2016) or the flag-wrapped machismo of American Sniper (2014). In a post-9/11 world marked by American invasions of choice and worldwide insurgent whack-a-mole, wherein the logic of dying for your country mostly no longer holds, these latter films offer mostly what I sometimes call “operator porn”—the slick, silver screen competence of a special forces team breaching a door or rappelling onto a roof, war as a tough but necessary job, efficiently undertaken by strong men. This cinematic candy tends to lose its flavor with the stakes of American wars now feeling so low, remote, or unjustifiable. Warfare refreshingly rejects these tendencies, but it reaches the end of so much pain only to soothe and reassure.

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Not long ago, a friend of mine who served in the Australian military and advised Iraqi troops tasked with retaking Mosul from the Islamic State gifted me a copy of the book Redeployment, by former Marine Corps lieutenant and public affairs officer Phil Klay. He told me it was the best book he’d ever read about contemporary war. Klay’s short stories in many ways share Warfare’s view of the Iraq War as something terrifying, boring, stupid, illogical, and ineffable. The war’s pernicious afterlife turns combat veterans into traumatized and hypervigilant husks, unable to fathom why they killed an Iraqi kid hefting an AK-47 or why an IED turned their squadmate into mush. Soldiers don’t fight for glory or love of country but for their battle buddy or to live up to their unit’s expectations.

But Klay’s writing contains a political valence that is absent from Warfare. Upon his book’s release in 2014, Klay wrote that his objective in Redeployment was to force the war experience in front of a civilian audience he hoped would be “both receptive and critical.” To fetishize the trauma of military veterans, to mark their suffering as something sainted, wrongly sets them apart as a different class of citizen. This could only prove a dangerous development in a democracy that inflicts violence in all our names, Klay argued. “[N]o one, not even a veteran, should have the last word,” he wrote.

Warfare, its brutality undone by a coda that tranquilizes the anxiety it has worked so hard to produce, takes a political stance of which it doesn’t seem to be aware. Garland and Mendoza’s objective was to forensically reproduce the real events of a day in the life of Mendoza’s squad as a way for the soldiers, some of whom were too badly wounded or traumatized to remember, to process what happened. “We all wanted this story for Elliott,” Mendoza told one interviewer. But the absence of politics is political. To make Warfare as catharsis for invaders who, whatever their personal beliefs, were part of an unlawful occupation that inflicted enormous suffering on Iraq is a choice that privileges their sacrifice and esteems their ability to endure the primal challenge of war.

Perusing posts about Miller, the wounded sniper, on Instagram and Facebook, one finds many fans. They cite his wounds and the struggles the team faced and are uniformly laudatory: “Definition of beast right here,” “Legend,” “Thank you for your service,” “True warrior,” “Thanks for being an example of never quitting.” A 2013 Inc. magazine article about Miller ties his sacrifice to the entrepreneurial spirit. “Success is less about what you do with your blessings and more about how you respond to getting knocked down,” the subheadline reads. The absorption of such a horror into the American business and self-help psyche is a fitting evolution for our understanding of war in the post-9/11 era, when it has become an industry unto itself, its glory stripped for parts. Given Mendoza’s role, it is perhaps not surprising that Warfare is ultimately more of a contribution to this legendarium than a challenge to the war that made him a hero.

In one of Klay’s short stories, a man envisions his own version of an anti-war film: a young man in the mid-20th century grows up, gets married, and has a child; then, he bravely signs up for the army after World War II, deploys to the Korean War, and dies in a beach landing in the film’s final minute, face down in the surf. It’s an uncinematic, even inconsequential, vision of war. Warfare nearly lands in the same place, but in spite of its formal and narrative gutsiness, its explicit purpose as a vehicle to help American soldiers understand their own pain, and to offer them absolution, suggests that there is a limit to how much the forensic reproduction of violence alone can act as commentary, and it makes it hard to call the film anti-war.

Then what is? In their interview, Siskel initially challenged Truffaut’s response by pointing to Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, an acidly cynical 1957 film about World War I and the cruelty of generals sending soldiers to senseless death. Truffaut replied that he believed Kubrick liked violence very much, and Siskel, after mulling the response for a week, eventually wrote that he agreed—Paths of Glory was critical of the generals and their insanity but makes a hero out of Kirk Douglas’s Colonel Dax, the principled man in the trenches forced to surmount and survive it. Warfare lacks both the cynicism and political critique contained in Paths of Glory, and it’s unclear in the end what, if anything, Garland wants to say about war.

Francis Ford Coppola, who readily admitted that his Apocalypse Now (1979) could never be an anti-war film, because its violence is too enticing, had his own idea. An anti-war film, he said, should be like Japanese director Kon Ichikawa’s The Burmese Harp (1956). The film, set at the end of World War II, follows a Japanese veteran who becomes a monk and sets about burying the dead. “[S]omething filled with love and peace and tranquility and happiness,” Coppola insisted, is the way: to make a movie that shows war’s violence and stupidity while presenting an alternative. Nearly a quarter century on from 9/11, it’s surely not too much to ask Hollywood directors to stretch in this direction. In our era of forever wars, there will certainly be more opportunities to find new ways to tell this story.