Alex Garland cut his directorial teeth with taut thrillers Ex Machina (2014) and Annihilation (2018), two of this reviewer's favorite films of the 2010s. But since straying from the safety of his sci-fi genre expertise in the 2020s, first with the offputting horror Men (2022) and then with the terribly muddled Civil War (2024), he's lost his edge. His newest film, Warfare, co-directed with former US Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, is no different: brimming with potential, and the product of a clearly skillful filmmaker, but ultimately half-baked.

95 minutes long and told in real time, Warfare is the story of Mendoza's personal experience during a 2006 battle in Ramadi, Iraq. Its script is bare-bones and largely adapted from interviews and testimonies with Mendoza's fellow platoon members about the skirmish. After a quick scene of a SEAL unit hyping themselves up to Eric Prydz's "Call On Me" music video, the film opens on a SEAL breach of an Iraqi household on a main thoroughfare in Ramadi; they are providing support for a Marine operation in the city, and hunker down in the home to monitor insurgent activity. The soldiers learn that a call to arms has been broadcast on local radio, and begin to observe rumblings of enemy movement. 

Soon enough, a grenade is tossed in the house, injuring and concussing three of the SEALs, especially sniper Elliott. The team calls in a tank to evacuate him, which appears to be going smoothly until an IED explodes against the tank door, killing the team's translator and making the evacuation too dangerous. Another SEAL team joins the first, and together they reorganize, treat their wounded, suppress insurgent gunfire, call in air support, and try to escape with their lives.

From the very first sequence, Warfare is certainly immersive. The script is tight and spares no military lingo, from terminology including "frogman" and "show of force", to callsigns like Manchu and Bushmaster, to plenty of invocations of the NATO phonetic alphabet. Even in chaotic firefights soldiers keep their cool via constant chatter, and their clarity of communications is impressive. That's especially true of the natural leaders within the group (who also tend to be played by the better actors), including Erik (Will Poulter) and Jake (Charles Melton). In addition, first-time director Mendoza is able to draw on his SEAL experience to choreograph complex yet visually engaging military engagements, especially when the SEALs' teamwork requires clockwork-precise movements in claustrophobic rooms and around sharp corners. The filming crew, including cinematographer David J. Thompson and editor Fin Oates, also work hard to bring us along each staircase sweep and air support raid. 

But past the technical skill exhibited by Warfare, it mostly feels like a war reenactment that doesn't engage with the human beings who fought in the War on Terror. Emphasis on the warfighting itself sidelines nearly all characterization of the soldiers, and it doesn't help that middling actors like D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Noah Centineo, and Kit Connor give immediately forgettable performances full of wooden line reads. What brought these men to war? How have they grown as a unit and arrived together in Ramadi? Do tough decisions, like the brusque treatment of Iraqi civilians or the ethically gray choice to impersonate a superior officer, weigh on their consciousnesses? None of these questions are broached, and so we're mostly forced to let our mind wander, such as by wondering what Charles Melton's agent has been doing, wasting the momentum from his electric performance in May December (2023) on this much more rote fare. Only relative newcomer Cosmo Jarvis shines through as wounded sniper Elliott, and his is a low bar to hit. 

As if aware how flimsy its messaging is, the film and its gritty marketing materials emphasize the veteran status of co-director Mendoza extensively: a prominent billboard states that "EVERYTHING IS BASED ON MEMORY", while another poster calls out "Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza", and a trailer boasts the faithfulness to the real war "based on the memory of the people who lived it." But by over-indexing on the veracity of the plot, Garland and team stay disappointingly agnostic on the memory aspect of their advertisements. What has changed in the real soldiers' recollections, feelings, and reflections since their fateful day now two decades ago? Do their accounts differ? If they do, does it matter?

Instead, there's a moment at the end of the movie where Iraqis emerge from their war-torn homes and peer around, inspecting the damage left by the vicious battle. It carries a real poignancy found nowhere else in Warfare. These represent real people whose lives and communities have been destroyed, and to what end? More painfully, which side is able to pack up and leave at the end of a skirmish, and which side is left picking up the pieces? No sooner than any heartfelt message attempted by Garland and Mendoza is started, though, than the co-directors immediately undercut it with a rah-rah end credits scene in which actual Navy SEALs are shown training with the actors, whose headshots are paired with the blurred photographs of the real soldiers involved. Not only does this highlight reel further make the whole effort feel like more of a film-school project than a movie, it also leaves an icky, propagandistic flavor that's hard to shake leaving the theater. 

As a military reenactment and filmmaking exercise, Warfare is technically gripping. As a film, it's barely there, with generic performances and hardly any effort to engage with its historicity or thematic messages.