Alex Garland's latest directorial venture is a joint project, and his co-director of Warfare lived the experiences dramatized on the silver screen. Ray Mendoza was a military advisor for Garland on Civil War, and apparently during that time regaled the director of his own experience in a fraught, deadly situation with Navy SEALs in Ramadi, Iraq, almost twenty years ago. During the American occupation at the time, his team got stuck inside a house and took heavy casualties before barely escaping with the few survivors. It wasn't a notable battle or major turning point in the war effort, unlike many war films, and it certainly wasn't an inspiring story of victory or noble defeat. But it did happen, and Garland decided it was worth recreating in painstaking detail with Mendoza helping to bring his memories to mass audiences.
Garland's usual excellent craft is very much on display here, but it's a different approach than he usually provides. Warfare is an immersive experience rather than a cerebral or spiritual one. We get to know the teammates in passing recognition, not quite spending the time to care about them individually, ultimately appreciating their clear and present danger in a hostile region. Threats could like behind any door or window in this desert city, and the team's goal is to set up an observation base overlooking a street market for enemy activity. The setup, in this way, is not wholly different from The Hurt Locker (or even something like Sicario, for that matter), and it doesn't take long for their cover to be blown. The whole film doesn't take long, for that matter, clocking in right around 90 minutes.
In fact, the film seems to be presenting these events in something very close to real time; after the team takes over an apartment under cover of darkness -- keeping its family of inhabitants fearfully hostage in a small bedroom under gunpoint -- it doesn't take long for enemies to descend on them. Literally. While watching an armed group rendezvous opposite the market, the team fails to notice assailants on their own roof, who deploy a grenade through their window and wreak havoc on the soldiers. With dust and blood coating the scene, the SEALs frantically try to figure out their next move, but their rescue tank is destroyed by the invisible enemy. With casualties mounting and the day drawing on, the soldiers try to make a plan out of the scant information they can receive via radio from their superiors. Amidst lots of hand-wringing and ass-covering by people who should be helping them regardless of material or political cost, the soldiers make a plan and wait for the next opportunity to be rescued.
It's an overwhelming, almost agonizing viewing experience, to be sure. Garland's cinematographer and sound designers work in tandem to embellish the bleak setting and events with so much sensory detail that viewing the film feels both electrifying and numbing. We're so close to the action that when explosions erupt, we hear something like tinnitus ringing over muted sounds, and we can't see through the blinding dust and smoke just like the characters can't. Legs are blown apart and we're meant to feel the crunching bone fragments as much as we see them in the bloody mess. We occasionally get random shots from other places not held by the team, and from overhead satellite images in black and white, which do break us out of the otherwise quite claustrophobic main action of the film, a strange choice that the editor should be spanked for making. This isn't Eye in the Sky.
A lack of real characterizations does not help the film, and for me, made it hard to connect with the film beyond its sensory presentation. I couldn't identify with anyone because they have no differentiating characteristics. Don't get me wrong: I applaud the actors for their physical and no doubt grueling time in principal shooting. There's just nothing of emotional or intellectual interest in their activity because we're given no time or reason to care for them beyond their vague assumed righteousness as Navy SEALs. We're forced into their perspective by the camera and screenplay, and it's telling that we never see much of the enemy combatants, nebulously and menacingly all around them yet rarely visible. And nobody acts in any particularly memorable ways, which while being realistic, makes it hard to root for anyone or fear anyone else.
The sound designers and technicians, which the credits list as more than a dozen people, should be awarded for their work on this film, as it's an astonishing aural experience. But I ended up walking away from this film wondering one particular thing, and it has persistently nagged my mind ever since: So what? What are we supposed to understand or take away from this film? I surely do not know, and I'm not convinced the filmmakers know, either. Maybe something about military brotherhood, or even small everyday heroisms that keep teams together in the face of battle. But it's not clear at all, and even these don't quite match up with my lasting impression of the film. I find myself also annoyed by the film's myopic approach to the war in Iraq; American Sniper was roundly criticized -- I think fairly -- for its xenophobic depictions of Iraqi soldiers and civilians, something that tends to plague war films in general, and frankly I don't see a difference in representation here despite not hearing any similar criticisms. I mean, even the brief moment near the end when perspective is poised to shift to the captured family, the film abruptly ends.
Final note: it would seem that the film's structural logic wants to posit the SEALs and their fight for survival as a sort of heroic, historic tale. As such, during the credits, we see pictures of the real men alongside pictures of the actors who play them. But this choice makes no sense for two crucial reasons that make this loose understanding of the film utterly fall apart: first, most of the real soldiers have their faces blurred, presumably because they are still in active duty or could be compromised by such broadcasting of their faces, and second, the ones who are pictured look almost nothing like their fictional counterparts.
So I encourage you to watch for the experience. But don't ask me what the point of any of it is, because even the film doesn't seem to know. "Slice of life" is one thing, but an immersive experience for no purpose feels like a magnificent waste of resources.
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