The big selling point of “Warfare” is its recreation of the “reality” of combat in the Middle East by a former Navy SEAL who was there.
But there have been scores of documentaries made by embedded filmmakers who detailed the grim, workmanlike but hi-tech nature of house-to-house searches and firefights of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan. And there have been a wide range of combat films capturing many angles of the nature of the service there.
Co-writer/director and combat veteran Ray Mendoza, aided by “Civil War” writer-director Alex Garland, in essence pays tribute to his comrades in remembering his own service and the trauma of a 2006 “op” in Ramadi with vague goals that shift from infiltrating an area of the city to simply getting each other out of there alive.
It’s a small scale “Blackhawk Down,” paying every bit as much attention to detail as that film, but barely sketching in “characters,” limiting its field of view to what the men on the ground saw and experienced and recollected and undercutting the viewer’s connection with all of this by everything that it leaves out dramatically.
It’s more an experiment in immersive “experience” than a movie.
Dozens of soldiers — it’s not well-established that they’re SEALs — deployed in platoon-strength units, work their way through the empty, silent streets at night. They find their target building — no, we don’t know why it’s targeted — infiltrate and quietly rouse the residents and hold them, smashing through walls to get to every apartment in it.
Daybreak has them using the structure as an observation post. The sniper (Cosmo Jarvis) and his spotter (Taylor John Smith) eyeball a building across the street, where unfriendlies are watching them. They make note of vehicles and how the suspects are clothed and pass it on via radio to other units nearby.
The Americans, with two nervous Iraqi soldiers who interpet and fear that they’re to be treated as sacrificial lambs, have communications gear that allows them to see infrared images of their location and the white heat signatures of their comrades down the road and the insurgents massing around them.
They have air support — aircraft providing those infrared pictures and fighter-bombers standing by for intimidating extremely low-level “show of force” flyovers. And there are Bradley armored personnel carriers nearby, ready to be summoned if they need to get casualties or get the entire unit out of there should things escalate beyond their ability to control.
Will Poulter (“Death of a Unicorn”) plays the commanding officer on the ground, and “Reservation Dogs” alumna D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai is Ray (Mendoza), in charge of communications with HQ, one of the many men there tasked with taking notes about what they see and the shifting situation which they’ve been ordered into.
The suspense builds as they watch and wait for what they’re sure is coming, with the viewer not clear on their “rules of engagement.” Spying a guy with a “PKM! PKM!” going into a building across the street raises the alarm but doesn’t trigger the first fusillade of fire.
There are civilians on the street, until a PA system urges one and all to join the “jihad,” which clears it. As the battle is joined, men with mismatched levels of experience and professionalism will undergo shock, fear and the endless screams of grievously wounded comrades — the part of “combat” that more swaggering military movies often leave out.
It’s that unblinking, pointilistic dissection of this one almost real-time 2006 firefight that recommends “Warfare.”
But from the familiar combat situations and over-familiar jargon, slang and acronyms used by men in uniform, “Warfare” adds no new insights or cinematic flourishes to that history and this genre of movie. The foe is faceless, and Iraqi allies are mistrusted and treated like cannon fodder.
The overt racism and carelessness with civilian “collateral damage” captured in “Mosul,” “The War Tapes” and other fly-on-the-wall documentaries made by embedded journalist/filmmakers is scrubbed out of this account of “our boys” under duress and the effort it takes to extract them from a jam.
The dull tinnitus and concussed dizziness that comes from an IED or grenade exploding too close to human ears, the “swarming” nature of Al Qaeda ambushes, the training that kicks in when professionals, from “new guys” to veterans of this dangerous duty, are tested under extreme conditions, we’ve seen it all before.
Mendoza’s pitch, to “get it right” and have “real combat vets” have their story told, might be noble in its intent and the tribute (stay through the credits) to their service the film represents. But he and Garland emphasize authenticity over empathy, accuracy over dramatic connection.
That makes for a solid account of a firefight as-it-happened, but a dull movie with too much “We’ve seen all this before” about it to be novel and eye-opening.
Rating: R, graphic violence
Cast: Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis,
D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Finn Bennett, Michael Gandolfini and Charles Melton.
Credits: Writen and directed by Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland. An A24 release.
Running time: 1:35
Movie Nation 