Review 746: Warfare

 

What's amazing about Warfare, Alex Garland's new war film is how unforgiving and grueling it is. It's about a very specific point of view from within one location without any greater context.  

In 2006, during the Battle of Ramadi, Navy SEAL platoon Alpha One takes control of a local house as par of a surveillance mission after their mission goes dangerously wrong.

I cannot think of a war film since Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk or perhaps Sam Mendes' 1917 that was this harrowing. It captures the intensity of combat that those films oddly didn't because it deals with very badly wounded people  It is a grueling experience. 

The opening 20-30 minutes of the film are done almost entirely in silence with minimal dialogue making it almost akin to a silent film. 

Alex Garland and his co-writer and director, real life Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza crafting a minimalist screenplay from the memories of platoon memories. Clocking in at 95 minutes, Warefare is extremely economical in its presentation. It takes place in real time   reality doesn't let people off the hook. It's sensory overload, I honestly wanted it to end but I mean that 

The film makes masterful useage of lack of music and sound to help enhance the suspense and the sense of realism. There are moments throught the film where the sound design becomes very expretionistic, where the soldiers who've been either shell-shocked or concussed by an explosion we hear what's going inside their heads and the diagetic sound is faded out. The production design is terrific; the two story house that these soldiers are held up in for the majority of the runtime is almost a character in of itself because    giving us a real sense of claustrophobia, Garland and Mendoza get a lot of milage out of these cramped spaces making us feel like we're in there with these guys.

Rounding out the film cast, Garland has assembled a group of young, Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Taylor John Smith, Finn Bennett, Michael Gandolfini. Impressive. Much like Nolan's Dunkirk, we don't get much backstory or front story or context to any of these soldiers, just people trapped in a terrible situation. They make you feel the pain and trauma that these soldiers experience. They're getting with their job, it's all by-the-book and then suddenly, everything goes to hell and they're thrust into this situation where