On Warfare (dir. Ray Mendoza & Alex Garland, 2025)
A film like Warfare arrives with claims of authenticity embedded in its DNA. Directed by a former Navy SEAL (Ray Mendoza) and a cerebral auteur (Alex Garland), shot in real time, with tight formations, clipped orders, and dust kicking up from every frame. It’s a visceral piece of filmmaking. The camera rarely blinks. The sound design is impeccable. You hear the war before you see it. Bullets crack, suppressed breath, static-heavy comms, boots on rubble. Every twitch and flinch is choreographed to look accidental. And yet, for all its technical brilliance, Warfare is a deeply conservative film. Ideologically threadbare, morally incurious. A 90-minute firefight that never once asks why.
This is Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down without the helicopters, without even the pretext of geopolitical reckoning. The enemy is everywhere and nowhere. Iraqis serve not as characters but as kinetic objects. Targets, obstacles, noise. They fire blindly, and die quickly. In Black Hawk Down, the Somalis were framed in much the same way: wave after wave of faceless militants whose function was to make the Americans look valiant, outnumbered, resolute. Twenty-three years later, Warfare recycles that same dynamic with more realism and less reflection. There is no narrative arc for the occupied, only entry wounds.
The SEAL team leader selects a house. At random or by instinct, it’s never clear. Which turns out to be two houses, joined awkwardly by a breezeblock opening upstairs. Two Iraqi families are dragged from their rooms, screaming and crying, and corralled into a bedroom where they’ll be watched over like prisoners. No translation. No explanation. A sniper is stationed for overwatch. The house becomes a forward operating base and a surveillance node: the comings and goings of locals are logged and whispered through radios, suspicions voiced in clipped terms. Grainy drone footage is occasionally spliced into the sequence. Air support watching from above. Though it offers little more than a bleached-out abstraction of the chaos below. What matters, in this moment, is control of the house. Not its meaning, not its occupants, just its tactical utility.
Even the two Iraqis embedded with the SEAL team. Presumably our chance at something messier, more complex. Are swiftly rendered expendable. “Hold the upstairs,” one’s told. The next time we see him, he’s being sent out the door during an evacuation. Seconds later, both are blown to pieces by an IED. There’s a brief flash of viscera, then silence. They are reduced to meaty pulp, never spoken of again. Their function is logistical, not human. They plug a language gap, absorb the first wave of shrapnel, and disappear from the film’s moral imagination. Not just expendable—disposable.
There’s an early scene, just minutes in, where the squad crowds round a screen to watch the music video for Eric Prydz’s Call on Me. A softcore aerobics fantasy from 2004. Tits, arses, sweat, lycra. The camera lingers, and so do the soldiers. Is this meant to signal youth? Camaraderie? The banality of down-time before battle? Or is it a wink at the soldier as infidel, the American gaze let loose in a Muslim country? The film doesn’t say. Like much else in Warfare, it hints at something deeper, but never follows through. The moment evaporates in favour of the next mission, the next breach, the next kill.
Garland is capable of much more. His best work interrogates systems: the invisible architectures of power (Devs), the distortions of technology (Ex Machina, Annihilation), and the failures of masculinity (Men). Here, he swaps critique for choreography. Mendoza, by contrast, seems committed to the clarity of the soldier’s perspective: the battlefield as the world in miniature. That tension could have yielded something powerful. Instead, it’s resolved in favour of immersion. War, rendered beautifully. Pain, rendered tactically. Not once does the film pause to ask what this team of Americans is doing in this Iraqi house, in this Iraqi city, in this unwinnable war.
There is a hollow neutrality here, disguised as authenticity. Warfare is not propaganda in the old sense (this isn’t John Wayne in The Green Berets). It doesn’t proselytise or preach. But its omissions are political. It positions us behind the gun, not in front of it. It flinches from the why, the how, the cost. Its moral clarity begins and ends with the squad: their bravery, their fear, their cohesion under fire. The rest. The civilians, the wreckage, the logic of occupation. Is out of frame, collateral in the narrative as well as the war.
There’s a moment near the end when the team regroups, bloodied, depleted, but still together. One SEAL, amped up. Adrenaline? Shock? Tries to engage with a severely injured comrade. First he punches him in the chest, half-mocking, half-connecting, then later steps on the man’s mangled legs. The scene is quick, unsettling, and played without comment. It’s the Mendoza character. Quiet, focused, the one who’s been providing emergency treatment for most of the last third, who finally loses it. His anger breaks the squad’s veneer of stoic discipline. And rightly so. But even this outburst fizzles without reflection. There’s no reckoning, no pause, no space to ask what this camaraderie actually means. Only that it’s brutal, automatic, and enforced.
And we still don’t know if the mission was a success or a failure. Not in political terms. Not in human ones. This is war as choreography, war as ordeal, war as immersive simulation. It gets the texture right and the history wrong. The SEALs survive. The house is evacuated. The Iraqis are dead. Roll credits.
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