Show of Force
DIRECTED BY RAY MENDOZA & ALEX GARLAND/2025
When things shift into high gear in Warfare, it’s not like a bomb going off. A bomb actually goes off. It is brutally sudden and deafeningly loud, leaving a mess of blood, guts, and human limbs in its aftermath. The affected party are an ambushed unit of Navy SEALS, who, in making the rounds on the dusty streets of residential Iraq during the waning days of the Battle of Ramadi (which spanned most of 2006 and is considered by some to be the bloodiest battle of the Iraq war), find themselves desperately cornered in an unsuspecting family’s home. Prior to the attack by a well-coordinated group of armed local resistance fighters, the small unit selects the dwelling, quite forcibly enters, and sets up shop.
For what deliberately feels like a ticking-clock mini-eternity, we watch as the American troops (all based on real guys, portrayed by Will Poulter, Charles Melton, Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, among others) sweat bullets in lieu of firing any real ones…yet. Soon enough, all hell will and does break loose.
Woon-A-Tai plays communicator/JTAC Ray Mendoza, Warfare’s co-director and one of the few servicemen identified by their real name. This being a film that stresses that not only is it based on a true story, but everything we’re seeing is derived entirely from the memories of the troops who were there. Therefore, it may seem slightly suspect that many names have been changed. But in the greater scheme of Warfare, this is a minor tick. There are all kinds of reasons why names on screen might be changed when it comes to sensitive material such as this.
Did I just say “sensitive”…? About a movie about a boots-on-the-ground still-recent n’ raw look at Navy SEALS on a dangerous official mission? Yes. Call it empathy or call it anything but that if you must, but amid this carefully presented military procedural that goes hopelessly sideways we come to understand and relate to the terror of being a sitting duck, knowing that all your contained firepower and whatever hutzpah might’ve gotten you to this point cannot save you. This is the true and tremendously effective greatness of Warfare. It isn’t long before the “fight or flight” choice quite sensibly and rightly lands on “flight”. But simply getting out of there ain’t so simple.
Warfare is co-directed by English filmmaker Alex Garland (Ex Machina; Annihilation) in the immediate aftermath of last year’s poignant hit Civil War, and his visual storytelling expertise is fully on display and appreciated. Garland’s touch, both in terms of the visual and the inwardly dramatic, are what positively sets Warfare apart from the similarly themed but far more jingoistic Lone Survivor (2013). First time director Mendoza served as technical advisor on that harrowing true-life military mission-gone-wrong film, as he also did on Garland’s Civil War. Garland and Mendoza resist leaning on exhausted tricks like frenetic handheld camerawork and frame-rate manipulation in order sell the chaos. There’s a real confidence in the telling of Warfare; the rare contemporary combat film that gets this element, among others, very right.
Clocking in at just over ninety minutes, Warfare doesn’t waste time being much other than immersively experiential. (The recommended viewing experience for this is in an IMAX auditorium with state-of-the-art audio to accommodate its incredible sound design). Most of that time is spent pinned down on the second floor of the ominously red-draped home the SEALS have overtaken from a frightened local family. The family’s trauma amid all of this is not an active priority of Warfare, although it is certainly not ignored. The question they ultimately, desperately ask- “WHY??”- is not and probably cannot be reasonably answered. All anyone can do is process what happened, presented here in all its ingloriously remembered fog of war.