Warfare: A Punishing Assault on the Senses

There are lots of movies out there that have been made to be more of an experience than anything else, and Alex Garland's Warfare pushes this idea to its logical extreme, mostly for better, and sometimes for worse. I haven't posted to this review blog in some time now between a full-time onslaught of college classes and a newly-found romance with a wonderful woman (yes, movie critics have feelings, too), but Warfare had been on my radar for months, and now that it's streaming on HBO Max, I finally got the chance to watch it. The verdict? I found myself disappointed in a couple of ways, but also pleasantly surprised in most others. I think that one does a movie an enormous disservice by walking into it with an idea made up in their head of what kind of story it should or shouldn't be, but Warfare is a short movie that clocks in at a little over an hour and a half, yet one that sometimes feels altogether too shallow as far as its actual story is concerned. Still, rarely has a war movie ever felt so punishing. I felt Warfare in my bones, and I think you will too. Does the name Ramadi ring a bell? This city in Iraq is the site of one of the most ruthless ground battles of the Iraq War, and Warfare does a predictably good job of capturing the intensity of one small part of the battle. Yet, it does an even better job of making the quiet in-between moments feel simply deafening.

Warfare was made on a $20 million budget, about half of what A24 allotted Alex Garland to make Civil War, and one of my primary complaints with this movie is that the budget cuts are sometimes annoyingly visible. Too much of Warfare looks like a movie set rather than an actual city in the Middle East, and while I understand that life and budget cuts happen, the sets of this movie are obviously just that - sets. Nevertheless, it's not as big a deal as I make it out to be here, and this movie easily makes up for any shortcomings with its decidedly potent strengths. The commitment of Warfare to the overall viewer immersion is commendable. There is no loud, blaring background score, nor are there any particularly artistic transitions between scenes. This movie is as blunt as a 5.56 NATO cartridge to the temple. Sometimes, Warfare is unsettlingly quiet. Other times, it's anything but, and it can flip back and forth between the two on a dime.

Warfare is a movie that is filmed as though it is unfolding in real time, much like 1917, if that movie dropped out of college and got a job killing militant dairy farmers on the other side of the world, that is. However, the most notable difference is that Warfare isn't shot to look like one single take. Still, it feels incredibly authentic, and when army support comes on the radio in the middle of a firefight and says that armed support vehicles are five minutes out, those five minutes feel like five unbelievably long and dangerous years. And despite its candid title, Warfare cares for the quiet before the storm. It's a patient movie, one that builds towards violence for about a third of its runtime rather than merely jumping into the fray mindlessly.

A movie named Warfare is bound to build its foundation on some manner of violence, and the gunfights in the film are wonderfully perspective-driven. The air is often filled with haze and noise, and you rarely see the enemy. This movie is competently simplistic and suitably dramatic without really trying to be conspicuous. The actual experienced explosiveness of Warfare is mercifully sparing as far as quantity goes, and so when something does actually explode, you feel the weight in your spirit and the impact in your bones because it's not something that happens every five seconds. The sound design of this movie is spectacular, and nowhere else is this so apparent as in the moments following one particularly fateful detonation. I don't know how to put it other than that this moment sounds painful. Granted, for all its technical prowess, Warfare works better as a demonstration of it than as a fully realized narrative, but what a demonstration it can be. Bullets zip by, seemingly indiscriminate in their desired destinations. Smoke and dust fill the air like a curtain that's trying to mask the violence in any way possible. Mistakes are made in the heat of combat, a fantastic touch that adds to the tumult. Warfare is often more felt than it is watched, so I would encourage you just to let all the chaos happen to you, to let all the dust and smoke and blood wash over you. A fair word of warning: it won't scrub out easily.

Warfare is an assault on the senses, and a ruthless one at that. It is at its best when it is trying to be as taxing an experience as possible, yet at its worst when its gimmick of an experience movie clashes with the need to create some semblance of a plot. Still, rarely has a war movie ever felt so unsettlingly honest and grounded, and if you have a penchant for war movies, consider this a can't-miss - even if war movies aren't your cup of tea, Warfare is well worth a watch. Its cast doesn't really contain any standouts, and that's the point. I felt like I was watching people react instead of actors acting, and Garland never tries to inject his movie with any pithy or artificial sense of drama. Warfare is a very matter-of-fact and blunt movie that can be felt in the bones, and apart from a handful of early missteps production-design-wise and a tendency to do too little, it remains punishingly fundamental in the best way and the logically perfect answer to movies that try to do too much.

Warfare - 8/10

2 Corinthians 10:3-6