Warfare: reconstruction of an Iraq War mission gone wrong is intense but emotionally ineffective

In some ways, Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland’s film takes us back to an earlier era of US war films: the period during and just after World War II, when movies like William Wellman’s The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) and Battleground (1949), Lewis Milestone’s A Walk in the Sun (1945), Henry Hathaway’s Wing and a Prayer (1944) and Lewis Seiler’s Guadalcanal Diary (1943) could depict the US war effort without the slightest hint that the heroism involved was anything but wholly justified. Should America have been fighting this war? Why, of course. How the hell can you ask?

Similarly in Warfare, questions like ‘OK, just what the blazes were US troops doing in Iraq in 2006, and in the end did their presence there achieve the least bit of good?’ never even remotely arise. This factually reconstructed account of what happened to a US naval platoon that found itself disastrously ambushed by al-Qaeda in a city in the governorate of Al Anbar in western Iraq concentrates wholly and exclusively on the attack and its results, told in real time. (Ramadi was eventually captured from the forces of Islamic State by the Iraqi army in 2016 after two and a half months of fighting.)

That said, Warfare exerts an undeniable impact and conveys an intense feeling of what it must be like to be under attack by an enemy without any scruples. (Contrast the famous Christmas Day of 1914, when British and German troops climbed up from their trenches to sing carols together.) This film never relents; it could almost be taken for found footage.

For the first 30 of the film’s 95 minutes, not a lot happens. We see the US troops, having enjoyed a film of glamour girls cavorting in minimal costumes, take over a building on a virtually deserted street, usher the terrified inhabitants into a room on the ground floor, check and prepare their weapons, break a sniper hole in an exterior wall and exchange jargon loaded dialogue with each other and with their HQ: “This is Frogman. Roger that, Alpha One.” Then, in through the sniper hole is tossed a hand grenade, seriously injuring two of the men, and the action starts for real.

Soon a tank arrives to evacuate the wounded; but before they can be carried to the vehicle it’s destroyed by an IED, leaving several dead in the street as the rest of the platoon retreat into the house. We never see the al-Qaeda fighters beyond distant briefly glimpsed figures as they duck behind a parapet; for the whole running time we’re held in the company of the US personnel.

This is the film’s strength – the intensity and immediacy of what we’re shown happening. We get a vivid sense of the peril these men are in right from the grenade incident. No time-lapse cuts, no nondiegetic music (that’s saved for the credits). In short, no easy escapes. The danger is there, in your face. “You remain in that state,” Garland says, “until circumstances relieve you from pressure or the moment, and that’s what Warfare does – it adheres to reality, not the reassurances of cinema.”

Paradoxically, though, the film’s strength – immediacy – is also its prime weakness. Garland’s earlier films Annihilation (2018) and Civil War (2024) didn’t lack for vivid scenes of armed combat. (Mendoza is an Iraq War veteran and this is his first film as a director. He took part in the Ramadi incident.) But in those movies, we’re given the chance to get to know the characters involved, their backstories, their motivations – in short, who they are, why they’re doing what they’re doing and why it matters.

There’s none of that in Warfare. We’re immediately introduced to a sizeable group of young men, almost all dressed in identical uniforms. It takes a while to tell one from another, to recognise their different accents (when they do differ, that is) and gradually to learn a few of their names. By the end of the film, we’ve acquired at least some of this information. But by then it’s a little too late to identify with them.

So, this is a highly watchable film. We can admire the vigour and precision of David J. Thompson’s camerawork, appreciate the evocative use of the setting (the actual house in Ramadi in and around which these events took place), the dedication of the actors impersonating the members of the platoon. But emotional involvement? Not so much.

► Warfare is in UK cinemas from 18 April.