Film: Warfare
Cast: D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Noah Centineo, Taylor John Smith
Director: Ray Mendoza, Alex Garland
Rating: 4/5
Runtime: 95 min.
This film is a real-time account of a 2006 mission in Ramadi, Iraq, where a U.S. sniper unit negotiates Al Qaeda insurgency. The drama featuring Joseph Quinn, Kit Connor, Charles Melton, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis and Kit Connor and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, plunges the audience into a hellish combat zone which gets on your nerves right from the beginning.
The opening scene is one of levity. We see a low-res video of a statuesque blonde in a skimpy leotard leading a group through a workout routine and the platoon of Navy SEALS clustered around the screen, loudly whooping, shouting and cheering her on. But that’s as far as the levity goes. The rest of the 90 odd minutes is a severe jolt to the senses.
Co-written and directed by Alex Garland with Ray Mendoza, a former Navy SEAL who served in Iraq and was part of the hair-raising mission, the movie takes the high road to making it real and brutal. There’s no romanticization of war. What there is, instead, is raw and hurtful. Chaos escalates with minimal visibility and the platoon is expected to perform their duties with courage, decisiveness and determination. These men have to look out for each other amidst the most challenging and trying circumstances.
There’s not much room for character development but you come to care about these guys nevertheless. The dialogue is terse, communication is strictly need based, there are no backstories – yet this blunt depiction of the brutality of war never allows us to forget the human faces behind it. The deaths, injury, trauma experienced in brutal frontline combat, as seen in this film, is profoundly affecting.
The platoon forcefully enter a strategically positioned house and set up their sniper unit.The terrified family is made to huddle against a wall and instructed to remain quiet while the soldiers set up positions for surveillance in order to ensure the area is clear for ground forces to pass through the following day.
Once they discover their proximity to an insurgent house the tension escalates leading up to a sustained unrelenting attack .Grenade attacks, a barrage of machine-gun fire and IED blasts draw the audience into a catch 22 situation where extraction attempts are thwarted and air support stymied by Al Qaeda snipers positioned on the roofs.
Glenn Freemantle’s sound design is highly effective. DP David Thompson’s mostly handheld cameras and Fin Oates’ editing combine beautifully to convey urgency in the life-and-death situation. Production designer Mark Digby does extremely well to recreate the urban neighborhood that becomes a heap of rubble in the aftermath.
Though the experience of individual traumas is quite harrowing, there’s not a single showy performance to behold. This is a tightly woven ensemble act that is more powerful because of it. There’s nothing heroic about ‘Warfare,’ it’s a brutalising experience that leaves you shaken. The directors work in sync together to present an authentic unfiltered experience that stays with you way after the movie is done.
