ABC News
[ Source: ABC ]
For once, the marketing hype is real: Warfare, the latest A24 thriller, is one of the most realistic depictions of modern military combat committed to screen.
Across 96 disorienting minutes, the film strictly hews to the perspective of its young platoon of American Navy SEALs, who attempt an evacuation during the 2006 Battle of Ramadi in the Iraq War. Hostile forces are barely glimpsed, their presence marked by a suppressive patter of bullets. War doesn’t make an action hero out of its characters; it shell-shocks them into oblivion.
The film also boasts an unprecedented veracity: half of its writing and directing team is Iraq vet Ray Mendoza (the other half being Civil War’s Alex Garland), who sought to forensically recreate a real-life incident from his own tour of duty without Hollywood embellishment. Accounts from other survivors were also incorporated into the narrative.
“If it didn’t exist in someone’s memory, it did not go into the story,” Mendoza told The Guardian.
This kind of gritted, no-nonsense approach makes Warfare an outlier in a genre notorious for blood lust and jingoistic cliché. Yet its narrow POV, by necessity, obscures the horrors that lie just out of frame.
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