DAN WEBSTER:
If you were to take a poll of veterans who have served in a combat zone as to what they fought for, you’d likely get a range of answers. And in this era of polarized thinking, at least some of those answers would reflect the individual respondent’s political opinions.
Yet if they were being honest, deep in the hearts of most if not all respondents, the answer would be more personal. And it would have to do with the feelings they had for the people they served with. Fighting for your country is one thing. Fighting for the person you’ve come to depend on, to trust and even in some cases to care for deeply, is something far more powerful.
That’s one of the key messages that co-directors Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza focus on in their film Warfare. Based on a real-life incident—in which former SEAL Mendoza played a part—the 95-minute film is told in real time and features some of the most realistic battle scenes ever put on film.
It was on Nov. 16, 2006, that a U.S. SEAL Team was dispatched to a neighborhood in Ramadi, Iraq. Their objective was to provide sniper cover for a group of Marines on a reconnaissance mission.
After breaking into a house of Iraqi civilians, the SEALs began observing what they eventually figured out was a gathering of resistance forces. Soon they found themselves under attack. And in an attempt to leave the scene, two Seals were severely wounded and an Iraqi interpreter was killed when an IED exploded near a Bradley Fighting Vehicle that had been sent to evacuate them.
From that point on, the Seals were on the defense, fighting for their lives as they tried to convince other Bradleys to come to their rescue while doing what they could to keep their wounded team members alive.
Canadian actor D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai plays Mendoza, who along with Elliott Miller (played by Cosmo Jarvis), are the only two characters identified by their real names. Mendoza is the communications expert and link between the beleaguered team and the command unit responsible for ultimately bringing them home. Miller, meanwhile, was one of the wounded.
Besides Woon-A-Tai, who starred in the Hulu series Reservation Dogs, and Jarvis, star of the Emmy Award-winning miniseries remake Shogun, the film’s other notable actors include Will Poulter as the officer in charge, and Michael Gandolfini (the son of the late James Gandolfini).
Warfare, though, is not about acting. Yes, the performances are solid, but other than the main four or five characters it’s difficult to tell one actor from the next. No, the strength of what the veteran Mendoza and the Oscar-nominated Garland (Best Original Screenplay for 2016’s Ex Machina) have put on the screen involves the production itself.
Telling the story in real time means we follow the team members from the late-night incursion down a dark Ramadi street, their entering of the house to confront and isolate a terrified family and the breaking down of a wall that separates one part of the house from the next—not quietly, but with a sledgehammer, no less. What follows then, as anyone who ever served in the military knows well, is the waiting.
When things change, as they do maybe 40 minutes in, the slow, if intense, pace of Warfare goes lightspeed. Soon there are explosions, rounds going off in all directions, and an ongoing brew of confusion, fear and anger—mixed with a devotion to mission even while subverting orders to ensure that practicality wins out over protocol—all of which tends to happen in the heat of combat.
In the midst of this, the one thing that overrides the courage of all involved—and, to be fair, that includes the armed Iraqis whose aim is to kill as many Americans as they can—is the sense of futility surrounding the mission itself.
Yes, Warfare the film pays dutiful tribute to the men who did their best to fulfill that aborted mission. But the lasting message comes in the form of a wail emitted by one of the Iraqi women as, in the midst or her ruined house, she continues to scream a one-word query, for which there is no real answer.
“Why?” she screams at the SEALs. “Why? Why?”
For Spokane Public Radio, I’m Dan Webster.
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Movies 101 host Dan Webster is the senior film critic for Spokane Public Radio and a blogger for Spokesman.com.