All’s fair in love and ‘Warfare’
'Civil War’s Alex Garland teams up with soldier-turned-director Ray Mendoza for an explosive recce
HERE IS ONE way to kick off your war film: start with an extended close-up of a sweaty, sleazy-as-hell music video. You may recall “Call on Me”, the electronic dance song by Swedish producer Eric Prydz, but you will definitely remember its more famous visual counterpart featuring sexed-up dancers in a high-intensity exercise class. It was one of the more indelible videos of my youth. And certainly co-writers and directors Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza will be banking on you knowing it too, because it is first thing you see in their new film Warfare, immediately invoking (at least for men of a certain generation) an industrial-grade scuzz, the slime of a sixth-form common room, eau de teenage boy. Soon the camera switches onto the men watching this early Noughties relic: transfixed soldiers. Upper thighs, horny eyes, and then, under the cover of darkness, we are scrambling onto the streets of Iraq.
It is 2006, two years into the Iraq War, and US and UK troops are engaged in the Battle of Ramadi, a bloody, explosive skirmish which lasted eight months. Warfare, which, as a prologue insists, is based on soldiers’ memories, concerns itself with a platoon of Navy SEALs on a disastrous day. The film’s events are based on Mendoza’s own experience as a Navy SEAL in Iraq; in Warfare, he is played by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai. The cast, mostly comprising young(ish) British actors, are all adept at their roles, though it is obvious who has star potential. Kit Connor, most famous for his role as a lovesick teenager in Netflix schmaltz fest Heartstopper, is well cast as an eager recruit whose personality splits in two over the course of the film. Joseph Quinn and Cosmo Jarvis put in, by a long way, the best performances here; the former playing a self-assured officer, the latter a gruff sniper. (It was difficult to assign adjectives because this film resists character development.)
The platoon’s mission and this film are splintered by an insurgent IED, which does serious damage to the Americans. As the offensive morphs into a rescue operation, the soldiers’ careful(ish) co-ordination is marred by inevitable, panic-soaked fuck-ups: a shot of morphine that is injected upside down; a clumsily launched smoke device; wild shots into the smoky abyss. Are they heroes? That depends on whether you think they’re doing heroic things. They fight for their country; they take an Iraqi family hostage in their own home; they piss in water bottles. It is impossible to divorce the isolated events of Warfare from the wider political context, though you sense that filmmakers would prefer us to focus on the action and the lives of these soldiers.
Which, at least while the film is playing, is not hard because Garland and Mendoza, who worked together on last year’s Civil War, present war as theatre. The co-directors’ camera work is alternately frenetic and eerily calm depending on the situation. Every so often, the Americans serve their enemies a “show of force”, which is when a jet zooms down the street in the hopes of intimidating the enemy: it is blistering and bewildering to behold. The impressive work of both cinematographer David J Thompson and sound editor Ben Barker ensure that you should watch this particular film in the cinema. This movie does not glamorise warfare — it appears frequently gruesome and inglorious — but it does make the prospect of violence thrilling. For 90 minutes, it is never less than captivating (until an unfortunate, unnecessary epilogue).
When that fateful IED goes off, exploding the plot and the characters’ lives, we are surrounded by opaque white smoke. For a few moments, it is impossible to orient ourselves — ditto the soldiers, slowly coming round to a new reality — and then the destruction slowly comes into horrible view. A torn-off limb, misplaced weapons, unrecognisable bodies. It is the closest to frontline action many of us are likely to get. Thank god, but the glimpse is electrifying.
‘Warfare’ is in Australian cinemas now.
This story originally appeared on Esquire UK.
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