JunkDror

“Join the Navy,” they said. “See the world,” they said. 

A recruitment slogan used by the U.S. Navy, it is elusive and discreet on the horrific details of deployment and brutal repercussions of war. Unfortunately for many, the reality of its nauseating violence and mortifying destruction doesn’t sink in until you’re on the battlefield, one booby trap away from death. For Ray Mendoza, an ex-Navy veteran of the Iraq War, such gore and terror remain so fresh in his mind, he and co-director Alex Garland present an entire feature film depicting one of the many intense combats he strategically survived–every radio call, wave of a gun, and piercing scream being recalled from memory. It is a gritty and grimy mission of endurance happening in real-time, and there is no holding on to solace just as much as there is no escaping terror.

The film begins with a squad of army men wooing and wailing over archival footage of unitard-wearing women in an 80s aerobic music video [Eric Prydz–Call On Me]. Their drooling over and objectifying of women, while not particularly funny, is energetically unifying as they roar in sensual bliss; you almost deem their obnoxious behavior acceptable when you consider this will be their only surge of dopamine for the rest of the picture. Without warning, we are transported outside to a dark and quiet residential street in Ramadi, Iraq, watching the squad stealthily approach a concrete home they have determined perfect to invade and overtake for their surveil ploy. The moment is tense and stiff, on the precipice of a calculated showdown; yet, the manly urge to disengage from your combat position to perform a “try not to laugh” dance only grows, and you can enter battle peacefully, knowing you got a restrained giggle out of your bro. 

The unexpected sprinkle of playfulness in Warfare does not end there, though it strangely becomes a measure of time and a grasp of comfort as it fades into solemn implosion. Their colloquial tongues and bottled urine are frequent reminders of their boyish idiosyncrasies, leaving us with the painful curiosity of what their lives could have been if not for the armour and camouflage. Elliot (Cosmo Jarvis), though serious and brooding, retains a youthful edge in his sharp and tactile awareness, but still refers to his peers as “bro” in his critically fatal, morphine-abiding condition. Tommy (Kit Connor), whose skill in combat has outpaced his emotional maturity, appears the most unadapted member of the squad as he feeds into paranoid gunfire by the end of the film. A hard hitting realization, this isn’t a band of hardened men defending an ideal, but a group of over-equipped adolescents trying not to collapse under the weight of it all. 

Painstakingly, they are everything and nothing at the same time. As we join the squad live in their panic, there are no backstories or redemption arcs to attach ourselves to, making the absence of context deeply unsettling. They are numbers in a system that eats them alive and refuses to provide aid when luck is most cruel, remaining largely anonymous to the audience as neither characters nor martyrs. Yet, their dependability on one another is detrimental to survival–a body in a line and a code name in a radio call is still a breath of knowledge capable of closing the margin of error, the fall of an entire unit. Though a liability just as much as it is a necessity, the unwavering trust that holds them afoot is the same suspenseful relentlessness that keeps us disoriented.

But can a war film that replicates the sensory overload of combat so viscerally, truly be “anti-war,” as Mendoza and Garland suggest? While Warfare may not glorify war, it doesn’t quite condemn it either, leaving you stranded in the dissonance and possible conformity of an irreversible, real game. It strictly forces us to watch what the boys will do next, with barely enough time to process what is happening, let alone why. So, is a war film without dramatized valor or victory, and only panic and peril, bruising the ego with insufficiency and daring the masses to prove it wrong? Maybe Warfare’s underlying indictment is not a rejection of war but a revelation of our indifference to its violence? 

One thing is clear: the true tragedy isn’t just who dies in war, but how easy it is to forget who they were.