In the Flesh: Warfare

Oh wow, is war really loud? Is it confusing? Does it rob soldiers and civilians alike of their humanity? Should we have a party? Should we invite David Petraeus? Alex Garland’s Warfare certainly seems to think so. Interchangeable characters recite reams of jargon over the radio. They fire guns, mostly at nothing, sometimes at faceless Iraqi insurgents. They yell at each other. They go into and out of the building in which the vast majority of the film takes place. What do they feel about each other? What do they feel about war? Who are the men trying to kill them, and why? What about the family the soldiers hold at gunpoint? Warfare isn’t interested in these things. It’s more reenactment than movie, a thuddingly literal interpretation of the experiences of a handful of Iraq War veterans. The only things it excavates from these memories are truths so shopworn they hardly count as information. 

Warfare is shot with evident care and precision, and there is a certain geometrically satisfying simplicity to its compositions. The scene in which a pair of Bradley vehicles circle a block while bombarding the house’s second floor with their main guns is kinetic and exciting, perhaps because it’s one of the very few scenes in which we see gunfire physically connect with anything. Elsewhere it exists as a kind of free-floating visual signifier of combat. We might see bullets strike walls, or watch a man firing a gun, but seldom anything more concrete. Charitably, you might say that Garland is trying to illustrate the fundamentally alienating character of modern combat, the stripping away of human nature and removal of daily life’s comprehensible action/consequence framework. Perhaps this is why his depiction of Baghdad is so lifeless, whether viewed from above by drone cam or at street level in desolate, bleached silence.

It’s evident Garland is trying to express big ideas here, but he simply lacks the insight and literary skill to get them across. In attempting to situate his viewer in the dislocated space of urban war, he has dislocated his film from anything compelling or human and neglected both to capitalize thematically on that inhumanity or to use it as a bridge to some interior truth. War is people moving in and out of buildings. It’s people who are alive and people who are dead. It’s disembodied voices repeating jargon over radios. So what? The best and most interesting scene in the film is quite literally a completely different movie: the legendarily sweaty, horny music video for Eric Prydz’s ‘Call On Me’. We open on the soldiers watching it together, thrusting their guns in the air and singing along as they hoot and groan at each new shot of slick, glistening skin bouncing in rhythm with the music. That’s it. It’s as straightforward and elemental as the remainder of Warfare is obtuse.