Critics reviews

War is hell, and Warfare refuses to shy away from it. Free of the operatics of most supposed anti-war films, it’s all the more effective for its simplicity. It is respectfully gruelling.

This is film-making that doesn’t just show you the horrors of war; it forces you to taste the dust and the choking panic, smell the fear and the cordite and the tinny metallic tang of spilled blood. Warfare, by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, is the most forceful and unflinching depiction of combat since Edward Berger’s 2023 Oscar-winning All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s also one of the boldest and most formally daring.

All Warfare has to offer, inevitably, is the violence itself, stripped from its source, like Men and Civil War before it. If the point is to warn us of its monstrousness, what can a film of this ilk offer if it bears no clues as to the origins of its birth?... Warfare’s violence feels unmoored without its context.

Few other American war films have come this close to acknowledging the true suffering of combat.

This is warfare, the film says, or at least a serious part of it: a grim waiting game, deadly dull... The effect is brutal. In 95 minutes of what feel like real-time events, you are left no headspace for more than the moment you’re in.

Alex Garland, the writer and director of Civil War, and Ray Mendoza, a veteran who was its military advisor, have co-directed a bold marvel of a film. Together, Garland's virtuosity and Mendoza's first-hand experience create a masterful technical achievement that is, more important, emotionally harrowing.

That Warfare is, in dramatically rendering a true story, visceral is hardly a surprise. What’s fascinating is how so much of the film commits to the waiting that exists during battle: the taxing, dull tension of knowing that something might happen any minute.

[A]n odd experience, at once overwhelming and numbing, immediate and clinical. It immerses viewers in the noise, blood and chaos of combat as it was experienced roughly 20 years ago in Iraq, with such physical, visual and sonic detail that it can genuinely be characterized as a rare war movie that doesn’t glorify its subject, even accidentally.

At a rapid-fire 95 minutes, Warfare covers just that one moment in all its excruciating detail. While the no-holds-barred honesty of injury and danger can feel overwhelming, in a sense, the film still functions like a traditional war movie in its "us versus them" approach.

The craft on display in this almost real-time reenactment of an improvised explosive device attack and the ensuing chaos is impressive... But the filmmakers’ unblinking focus... winds up being both the source of the movie’s sickening minute-to-minute suspense and, eventually, its failure to add up to more than a 95-minute full-body immersion in intensely unpleasant sensation.

But if a movie can be elegant and brutal at once, this one is... Most war films strive to establish their characters as individuals. Warfare is different.

The highest praise I can offer “Warfare,” a tough, relentless movie about life and death in battle, is that it isn’t thrilling. It is, rather, a purposely sad, angry movie, and as much a lament as a warning.