You don’t need to have fought in a war to make a great war movie: though neither Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, nor Stanley Kubrick did, the movies they made about the horrors of combat endure. But you could argue that the stakes are higher when a filmmaker who’s been to hell and back sets out to express the truth of his experience as, say, Sam Fuller did, using his own World War II diaries as the basis for his great, grim 1951 Korean War–set film The Steel Helmet. Members of the armed services who have seen combat and lived to tell about it often don’t tell about it. Which makes the accounts of those who do mean that much more.
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Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza has teamed with Civil War and Ex Machina director Alex Garland to make Warfare, which the two wrote and directed together. Mendoza was part of a team of Navy SEALs who, one day in November 2006, were sent into an apartment building in Ramadi province, Iraq, on a treacherous surveillance mission. Within just a few hours, al-Qaeda forces had tossed a grenade in their midst, injuring two SEALs, one of them sniper and medic Elliott Miller (played in the movie by Cosmo Jarvis). Miller was even more seriously wounded, along with another SEAL (Joseph Quinn), when an IED exploded outside the building as they were being evacuated.
Warfare tells the harrowing story of their rescue in real time—even though much of this movie is constructed from long, languorous takes, the film moves forward in tense fits and starts. The squeamish will need to steel themselves for Warfare. Though the camerawork is relatively discreet, the imagination all too easily fills in any gory details the eye can’t see.
But if a movie can be elegant and brutal at once, this one is: the dissipating smoke from the grenade hangs in the air, a pinkish-gold mist; polka dots of sunlight stream through a scattering of bullet holes in a door. Mendoza and others who took part in the mission (played by a group of fine young actors including D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Charles Melton, and Will Poulter) pieced the story together from memories of that day. Miller doesn’t remember the day’s events at all, and Mendoza has said that he wanted the movie to be “a living snapshot” for him, a way of honoring all that he lived through but can’t recall.
Most war films strive to establish their characters as individuals. Warfare is different. Though we become intimately familiar with each young face, the men’s names and specific jobs are blurrier. The idea is that if one of them goes down, the rest feel it acutely, all connected by a single circuit. As for those of us who know about the experience of those in the military only from movies and television, sometimes after a lifetime of viewing: the older you get, the younger these characters look. These are the people—men and women—we send to war, and the U.S. doesn’t have the greatest history of caring for them upon their return. It’s painful to look at the young actors’ faces in Warfare and think of the real-life men they’re portraying, now well into middle age. In a landscape that appears to be tilting toward slashed benefits for veterans and understaffed facilities, how well will they be cared for going forward? This is what you get for going to hell and back. There’s no such thing as a hero’s welcome.