Over 20 years on from the outbreak of the Iraq War, culture at large still has no idea how to really deal with it.
In stark contrast to the Vietnam War, which inspired countless classic films and led to plenty of great protest anthems, the Iraq War has been the one war that creatives cannot get a handle on.
With the Vietnam War (and to a lesser extent, the Korean War), there was a clear set of stakes: West versus East, capitalism versus communism, McNamara’s domino theory, Hawkeye and Rambo, the Russian roulette scene in The Deer Hunter, all that good stuff.
With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, bored baby boomers were looking for their shot at glory and trying to prove they could be just as accomplished as their daddy before them, with no clear goal or objective in sight.
The War On Terror saw America looking for an excuse to flex its muscles in the post-Cold War era and to condition the public into thinking that a permanent state of war was good for the soul.
This flimsy justification for a war means that filmmakers have failed to make truly great art about the War On Terror.
Kathryn Bigelow successfully threaded the needle, becoming the first woman to win Best Director at the Oscars due to her work on The Hurt Locker in 2009, and 2012’s Zero Dark Thirty was so effective because it addressed the moral ambiguity at the heart of the venture.
Warfare, the new film from Alex Garland, falls into the original sin of creating art about the War On Terror – there is no moral justification for it, and just tells us that “war is hell” for 90 minutes without saying anything new or insightful.
Alex Garland shot to prominence as a novelist in the late 90s, with The Beach famously being made into a Danny Boyle film directed by Leonardo Di Caprio (and unleashed a banging Moby and All Saints soundtrack on the culture) and 28 Days Later redefining the zombie genre in 2002.
Since breaking out as a screenwriter, Garland has fancied himself as a director with 2014’s Ex Machina serving as his breakout – were we about to see a new, cerebral British auteur in the same style as Jonathan Glazer or Christopher Nolan?
Subsequent films from Garland have shown increasingly diminishing returns.
2024’s Civil War, which we admit to being too harsh on in our initial review this time last year, was a noble failure as it was so subtle in its tone and messaging that it might as well have not been there at all.
The flourishes that stood out in Civil War were his deployment of needle drops and using jarring Adam Curtis-style juxtapositions of music, sound and visuals while making us care about what happens to the characters.
What was so successful in Civil War is entirely absent in Warfare.
Garland assembles a crew of big TV stars such as Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things), Charles Melton (Riverdale, and yes, May December before any Todd Haynes fans send angry letters), Will Poulter (Dopesick, The Bear, Black Mirror), Cosmo Jarvis (Shogun), Kit Connor (Heartstopper), Noah Centino (The Recruit) and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (Reservation Dogs) and drops them into what is basically a chamber drama.
Warfare largely takes place in one location – a house in Ramadi – and in real time, as a group of American soldiers provide support for an ongoing American troop assault in the area.
The other half of the coin is co-director and writer Ray Mendoza, a real-life Iraq War veteran who worked with Garland on Civil War and told Garland about his experiences in Iraq.
Garland brings his stylistic flourishes to the film and his masterful use of tension, while Mendoza makes the action as incredibly realistic as he can – after all, he’s recounting his own memories of being in that house.
The film opens with the troops at base watching the music video for Call On Me by Eric Prydz, something the real soldiers watched at base before heading out, and that is the only ounce of personality the film shows in the entire run time.
In any good war movie, you develop an attachment to characters; we wouldn’t have cared about Martin Sheen sailing down the river in Apocalypse Now if we weren’t so invested in his story and we want Matt Damon to be rescued in Saving Private Ryan because we know that Tom Hanks is coming to rescue him.
Garland and Mendoza argue that in war, there is no room for sentimentality, and what you see in Warfare is what you really get.
If that was really the case, then why cast actors who are best known for their TV roles and have the actors pal around on a press tour like they’re members of a boy band?
Ben Affleck memorably asked Michael Bay on the set of Armageddon, “wouldn’t it be easier to teach astronauts how to drill than teach drillers how to become astronauts?” and the same thing applies here.
If Garland and Mendoza were so insistent on making Warfare the real thing, why would they cast TV leading men with millions of Instagram followers instead of real military professionals?
We know the answer to that – it would turn into a propaganda film that is shown in the cinema in Inglourious Basterds.
Like in Civil War, Garland has no interest in exploring the politics behind the movie, which is a fatal error when you are dealing with such a charged topic like the war in Iraq.
Warfare is a well-made movie from a technical point of view, but it might as well hand audiences a video game controller and put a health bar on screen for how shallow it is.
If Garland and Mendoza are trying to make the point that video games and social media have made people numb to the realities of war, then they have made the point incredibly well, and we are just dummies for not picking up on it, but we aren’t willing to give them that much leverage.
Garland and Mendoza achieve their aim of making an incredibly realistic depiction of war with some incredible sound design (if there’s ever a movie to see in a cinema, it’s this, your flimsy TV or laptop speakers won’t do it justice), but have also succeeded in making a tragic, pointless war a vapid piece of content with nothing to say.