‘Warfare’: Alex Garland re-creates Iraqi town for battle scenes
Co-writer/co-director Alex Garland explains how he re-created an Iraqi neighborhood to film battle scenes for the military drama “Warfare.”
There’s a disembodied, bloody leg on a road that’s seen throughout much of the movie “Warfare.” In a slasher picture, it’s a sight that would lean comical. In this fierce war film, it’s a surreal, unmoving constant and a different sort of horrific.
While director Alex Garland’s “Civil War” looked at a battle that could be, “Warfare” (★★★½ out of four; rated R; in theaters Friday) examines a battle that was, in brutally visceral fashion. Garland co-directed and co-wrote this intense, tightly packed narrative with Ray Mendoza, his “Civil War” military adviser, based on a 2006 surveillance mission in Iraq that went awry for Mendoza’s Navy SEALs unit.
To do it, they cast a bunch of young Hollywood up-and-comers to play American soldiers in the middle of a harrowing standoff with Iraqi insurgents, including Will Poulter, Kit Connor, Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton, Michael Gandolfini and more.
Poulter plays the leader of a SEAL group – which includes communications officer Ray Mendoza (D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai) – embedded in a two-story apartment building in the Ramadi province. As preternaturally still sniper Elliott (Cosmo Jarvis) keeps an eye on Al-Qaeda operatives in a nearby marketplace, the rest of the guys do push-ups, tell jokes and listen to radio chatter in a sort of ominously monotonous limbo. You know something’s going to go bad, you just don’t know when.
That kind of palpable tension doesn’t let up. Instead it just changes course over 95 minutes of quasi-real time. And when a couple of grenades are thrown into their space – because insurgents happen to be in the house next door – the action both ratchets up and begins to spin out of control for the soldiers. Elliott’s hand is injured so they call in a pair of tanks to help extract him, but in the course of the rescue, a massive IED explosion causes chaos and casualties.
The SEALs desperately try to help their gravely wounded compatriots while some keep their own injuries, psychological as well as physical, to themselves. Another nearby SEAL team – led by Melton’s character – joins them to help dole out morphine to the injured and figure a way out, even as the enemy dangerously closes in.
“Warfare” leans into immersing its audience in the carnage like recent war films such as “Dunkirk” and “13 Hours.” It’s also much more effective at leaving the viewer as discombobulated as those personas onscreen. You barely get to know the characters – for example, excitable young gunner Tommy (Connor) has some definite “new guy energy” – before the situation turns hellish, but that’s not really the point of “Warfare.” Garland and Mendoza want you to feel, not watch, what they’re going through. The never-ending, gut-wrenching screams. The gory mess of a limb that may never be usable again. The absolute fear of wondering if you have hours, minutes or even seconds to live.
There’s no glamorization of war here – the youth of the actors reflects men sent off to unpredictable battle zones before their lives have even really started. “Warfare” also captures the terror and confusion of those unwillingly caught up in the fight, in this case an Iraqi family whose place is taken over by American soldiers in the dark of night wielding guns and sledgehammers.
And while it’s a true tale, the title card at the opening says that the film’s based on their “memories.” In that sense, rather than a millennial take on “Saving Private Ryan,” “Warfare” seems unflinchingly real, capturing a harrowing moment in these men’s lives that feels lived instead of just another war story.
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