[COLUMN] Warfare is a Different Kind of War Movie | by Darren Mooney

French filmmaker and critic François Truffaut famously argued that “there’s no such thing as an anti-war film.” Truffaut contended that the depiction of the act inherently glorified it, that film imposed a moral framework on what it portrayed, whether asking the audience to empathize with soldiers in combat and to root for them or even just inviting the audience to thrill at the visceral spectacle of combat. Popular films tend to be exciting, so popular war films tend to make war exciting.

It is possible to quibble with Truffaut’s observation in individual cases. It is difficult, for example, to argue that any audience leaving Elem Klimov's Come and See would be inspired to enlist. Still, the sentiment is a useful prism through which one might interrogate the genre as a whole. It invites a critical viewer to consider the language and conventions of the war film and how the logic of cinema perhaps bends towards propaganda. Even Star Wars quotes The Triumph of the Will.

It is interesting to consider Warfare, the recent film from directors Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland, in this context. Warfare is an attempt to recreate an incident from Mendoza’s service in Ramadi in Iraq in 2006. The film is so true to reality that D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai plays a character literally named Ray Mendoza. Mendoza designed the film as a tool to help fellow serviceman Elliott Miller recover his lost memory of the event. Cosmo Jarvis plays a character literally named Elliot Miller.

Warfare is heavily experiential. There is no overarching narrative. There are few of the conventions of the standard war film. There is no briefing scene of characters standing over maps. There are no exposition dumps about the larger tactical objectives driving the action. Most of the dialogue is technical jargon, which goes untranslated. The film does not purport to be based on a true story, instead promising its audience that it is “based on memory”, a much trickier and subjective thing.

Much has been made of whether Warfare is – or is trying to be – an “apolitical” war film, and the inherent absurdity of trying to make a war film that lacks a political perspective. This recalls the discourse around Alex Garland’s previous film, Civil War, which was heavily criticized in some quarters for being “apolitical” despite the inherent politics of choosing to depict the social collapse of the United States through the same lens that Hollywood had long reserved for places like Vietnam.

Civil War and Warfare make interesting companion pieces, in that they are movies about how war is framed. The discourse around these movies tends to displace politics into a rigid orthodox framework that requires a linear mapping to current events, instead of engaging with the larger context of how those ideas are framed and presented. Garland’s films expected an engaged viewer rather than a passive one.

“I also have a generalized faith that sometimes just trying to be as straightforward as possible allows for thought processes and debate,” Garland has explained of his process. “That often gets read as apolitical, and I think that’s wrong. One would have to have a discussion about what constitutes politics. To me, if I filmed someone going to the doctor, that would innately be political, because there would be questions about what kind of doctor is it? What are they being treated for? How did they acquire the illness that they have? And the list would just go on and on and on.”

Garland sees his lens as a passive observer of unvarnished reality, explaining that Warfare is “not attempting to telegraph a message. It’s attempting to telegraph information, and it’s telegraphing the information in as honest a way as it can.” Garland describes himself as “left-wing” and suggests that his “straightforward” approach is inherently anti-war, contending, “I don't think it is possible to make a statement about what war is really like without it being implicitly anti-war, in as much as it would be better if this thing did not happen.”

“It isn’t meant to fit into some political box,” Mendoza explains. “There’s not a lot of narrative for a reason: it’s for you to fill in the blanks. There’s no score for a reason: adding music, I can lead you to believe what I want you to believe or I can make you feel what I want you to feel – sad, angry, and so on. But if you watch this and say I think war is a good thing, then you should reassess how you view things.” Garland and Mendoza see the presentation of the lived experience of war as inherently anti-war, proof of Stephen Colbert’s famous joke that “reality has a well-known liberal bias.”

There is a sense in which Garland and Mendoza are being a little disingenuous. After all, even if the entire film is based on memory, Garland and Mendoza still position themselves as editors. The film cannot show everything that everybody alleged happened as it happened, and so choices need to be made in what information is structured into the film and how it is presented. The film rejects many of the conventions of the war film, but – as Garland points out – what it shows is innately political.

Elements of Warfare could have been ported over from a standard jingoistic war movie. The closing moments feature the cast hanging out with their real-life counterparts. The movie ends with a dedication to their service. The final shot is a photograph of actors and soldiers posing together, raising their middle-fingers to the camera. It does play into that romantic notion of service and brotherhood that drives so many war films. However, there is something thornier stirring beneath.

The film never really explains the mission that the soldiers have been assigned to complete. It never explains what they hope to accomplish. In the film’s opening minutes, Warfare shows a bunch of American soldiers walking down a street, deciding that one of the houses looks fit for purpose, so they break into that house, hold the family that live there at gunpoint, and then immediately take a sledgehammer to the building’s internal architecture.

All of this undoubtedly happened. All of this is assuredly based in reality. That sledgehammer is not a metaphor, there was a real sledgehammer. However, Garland and Mendoza still made a deliberate choice to introduce the stakes of this movie with these actions without any larger context, to invite the audience to consider what they are watching. It is a bunch of Americans in a foreign country, deciding that somebody else’s property belongs to them, and immediately smashing it to pieces.

The family that owns the home are held hostage in a downstairs bedroom. When a troop carrier arrives to ferry a wounded officer back to base, the two Iraqi translators are ordered to go out first to draw potential enemy fire away from the Americans. As the Americans withdraw, leaving the house a ruin, one of the women (Inbal Amram) demands, “Why? Why? Why?” The officer in charge (Will Poulter) can only stutter a confused reply, “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Indeed, in these closing moments, Warfare breaks its own rules. While Garland and Mendoza insist that the film was based solely on the memories of the soldiers who served, the film goes out of its way to depict the immediate aftermath of the American withdrawal from the house and the street. A father (Aso Sherabayani) comforts his daughter (Amira Dutton), assuring her that she is finally safe. After ninety minutes of sustained terror, the street is finally peaceful.

Even the film’s more conventional and jingoistic touches feel pointed. The closing credits do the standard war movie beat of showing the actors compared to the real-life inspirations, but many of the real-life soldiers opt not to show their faces. They are instead blurred. The choice to show those blurred faces instead of not showing the photograph at all underscores how contested the Iraq War is. Pointedly, the second-to-last photo in the closing montage is the terrorized Iraqi family.

As suggested by Mendoza’s involvement and his motivation for making the movie, Warfare is sympathetic to the soldiers who are fighting the battle. However, it does little to glorify them. After one brutal skirmish, the previously cool and competent officer in charge is so disoriented and concussed that all he can do is to sit on the bed and mumble. When enthusiastic reinforcements arrive to back up the unit, their gung-ho excitement is undercut by the fact they repeatedly trip over the bloody legs of one wounded soldier (Joseph Quinn) whose feet are held on by nothing but exposed tendons. It’s nightmarish.

Warfare declines to impose a larger context on this horrifying experience, but that feels like a choice itself. If Garland and Mendoza choose what to show, they also choose what not to show. The film’s lack of a traditional story framework is important, because one of the ways of legitimizing a war is to provide a narrative. The Second World War looms large in the American consciousness as “the Good War”, with the propaganda films overseen by John Ford literally titled Why We Fight.

Warfare feels like a response to cinema’s role in narrativizing war, particularly as a way of justifying this sort of foreign intervention. The Iraq War occupies a strange space in the American consciousness, in that it is a war without a narrative. The story that was fed to the public to justify the war – that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction – was disproven almost immediately, and yet American intervention continued for over twenty years.

The Iraq War happened because the Bush Administration wanted it to happen. “When the Bush Administration came in January 2000, they already had a goal of attacking Iraq, but they had no justification and reason to be able to do that, none whatsoever,” Dennis Fritz argues. It was framed as such an inevitability that no real attempt to justify it was made. As Michael Mazarr notes, “There was no single meeting, no formal options paper, no significant debate about the consequences.” It is hard to translate that into some morally righteous or justified purpose.

Many of those who served struggled to understand the conflict in any larger context. “I think we were in Baghdad for a few days,” veteran Stuart Wilf told The New York Times. “And then we were in a firefight outside the Abu Hanifa Mosque. And it was just totally bizarre, just fucking gunfire everywhere, a couple of R.P.G.s. And I was just thinking, ‘What the fuck am I doing here?’ And that question never went away. I don’t know how to explain the war to myself and have yet to have any clear thought of like, ‘Yes, we actually made a difference there,’ because we didn’t at all.”

There are movies to be made about the political decision to invade Iraq. In fact, Adam McKay did just that with Vice. However, Warfare is not set inside the Bush White House. It is instead about the memory and the subjective experience of the Iraq War. While there is an abstract quality to the visceral experience, Warfare’s refusal to offer the audience any narrative justification or any larger context that might explain or excuse what is happening feels true to the cultural understanding of the Iraq War.

Like Civil War before it, Warfare is about how these sorts of stories and conflicts are framed and told. In that sense, Warfare feels engaged with the current “post-truth” moment, in which the larger narratives of contemporary American society seem to be up for argument and negotiation. In these times, it seems like significant portions of the population cannot agree on basic facts, let alone the larger realities constructed from those facts.

Warfare feels like a response to these anxieties. The film strips out any notion of a larger narrative, because so much of the modern discourse involves individuals choosing to live in their own reality. The film even declines to assert that it is based on objective reality, because so much of the population will happily embrace “alternative facts” to support their own viewpoint. Instead, Warfare boils its portrait of war down to its essence: the subjective experience of combat. Everything else is just noise, a potential corruption of signal.

In presenting that unvarnished and largely unnarrativized account to audiences, Warfare shrewdly bypasses much of the noise of modern discourse. However, the film itself is clearly predicated on the belief – a belief borne out by the sheer nightmarish experience of watching it – that simply presenting the chaos, the violence, the brutality and the horror as experience by those who lived it tells its own story. And that story is perhaps less liable to be distorted or co opted or manipulated.

Warfare strips the war movie of its most dangerous weapons: justification and explanation.