Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland’s “Warfare” use realism to obscure the reality of the Iraq war.
The central value proposition of “Warfare,” the new Iraq war film co-written and co-directed by ex-Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland, is realism. On a technical level, it hits the mark. As a story about the U.S. war in Iraq, it obscures and sanitizes the conflict it seeks to depict.
“Warfare” is based on a real mission that Mendoza himself participated in, and is constructed from his memories and those of other participants’. In a taut 95 minutes, Mendoza and Garland aim to re-create how a Navy SEAL team conducting a sniper overwatch mission in Iraq, in 2006, was discovered and attacked by insurgent fighters, and the SEAL team’s subsequent struggle to make it out alive.In „Warfare“, Iraqi civilians are given scarce screen time and mostly ignored.
Mendoza has described his approach to the story as “investigative, forensic” and said the threshold for including material was “if it didn’t happen on that day, it wasn’t going to be in the film.” A lot of the movie depicts moments of life in combat with a naturalism that is rarely seen on the silver screen. As the SEAL platoon breaks into an Iraqi civilian home and turns it into a makeshift surveillance center, the viewer is immersed in constant, detailed communications about location and the tedious minutiae of intelligence sharing which may or may not be significant. We witness the enervating focus required to monitor city streets with a sniper scope for hours, and mundane banter as a SEAL complains about having lost a shirt. There is a sense of being embedded in there alongside the SEAL team in real time, and the buzz around the movie is about how “scrupulously realistic” it is.
But this movie is not a documentary, nor is it shot like one.
This movie is driven by spectacle — specifically, awesome displays of American power and precision. The training and movement of the SEALS, the sophisticated weapons at their command, the way aircraft are deployed in “show of force” maneuvers to deter insurgents are central to the entertainment.
