What The Hell America!

Warfare is doing very well with audiences and critics, though it can’t match the box-office numbers of Civil War (2024), the previous collaboration between Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza. And A Minecraft Movie still rules the cineplex.

I found Warfare enraging. Before I explain why, I should note that “the war film” is my least favorite genre. Occasionally great war films get made, but they tend to be unique and ambitious films such as Fires on the Plain (Japan, 1959), The Battle of Algiers (Italy and Algeria, 1966), and Come and See (USSR, 1985). America also makes a good war film here and there, such as), Apocalypse Now (1979), Glory (1989), and the brilliant D-Day sequence in Steven Spielberg’s otherwise heinous Saving Private Ryan (1998), which stole some of its most harrowing effects from Come and See.

But the American war film tendency is to follow certain jingoistic genre formulae, even while feigning great seriousness. There’s the building-of-company-cohesion narrative, taking soldiers from all regions, backgrounds, races, ethnicities, religious practices and putting away their differences as they learn to be a fighting unit. There’s no “I” in team, though technically there is one in “melting pot”!

This narrative, which really got set in stone in WWII combat films, often overlaps with the fake antiwar film formula. The phony antiwar film actually makes war seem like a cool adventure with exciting action sequences, but there are periodic scary battles and gory casualties followed by laments about how terrible war is. The phony antiwar film is hilariously pilloried in Tropic Thunder (2008), in which Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr play two actors trying to outdo each other in hammy sobbing over Stiller’s gruesome fake injuries, which make his handless arms look like two exploded vegetable stalks.

War films in general use the thrill of violence, all the shooting and explosions, to create a great excuse for male actors to look stern, brave, and resolute under fire before collapsing into each other’s arms. Because there’s so much reassuring machismo surrounding it, their wounds and emotional traumas make expressions of tenderness between men something that can be glorified without arousing any suspicions about being “too gay.” You see a lot of this strategy in the lugubrious “band of brothers” narrative, which glorifies the love of men in combat as superior to all other loves.

Warfare makes typical use of a cast of up-and-coming male actors, a few of whom might be on the cusp of stardom, to engage in the usual heroics, including Will Poulter, Charles Melton, Joseph Quinn, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Michael Gandolfini, Cosmo Jarvis, and Kit Connor.

Warfare skips the building-of-company-cohesion scenes, which we can assume precedes the film. We meet a team of Navy SEALs who’ve already bonded, and we witness their unity in the absurd opening sequence featuring the men all gathered around a TV set to watch a grainy 1980s-style music video of the song “Call on Me,” imitating an aerobic exercise show with women in skimpy leotards doing pump-and-thrust moves while eyeing the camera lasciviously.

Closely packed together, the men are howling in erotic appreciation. It’s probably the silliest of all the nobody-here-but-us-horny-heterosexuals openings to a war film I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen so many of them, with the anxious, overly insistent camerawork scanning slowly past pictures of sexy women tacked to barracks walls while the microphones pick up soldiers discussing their wives and girlfriends far away and how desperately they long for women, if only this damn war would end!

Warfare is going for the ripped-from-actual-accounts-of-battles hook, with Ray Mendoza — who was Garland’s war consultant on Civil War — providing the story from his own experience serving as a US Navy SEAL during the Iraq War. This approach is convenient, since charting one tense mission gone wrong, ripped from its context, spares the filmmakers any need to be honest about that ghastly boondoggle based on the baldfaced lies of the war-addled George W. Bush administration, which were amplified by a corrupt press. Remember how we were assured American soldiers would be welcomed as liberating heroes?

That war, lasting from 2003 to 2012, cost us $728 billion. Almost 4,500 American service members died, along with Iraqi deaths officially numbering “approximately 200,000,” though it may be more like 600,000.

But no such sickening reality interferes with the thrill of combat in Warfare, as the brave company of SEALs takes over an apartment building in Ramadi, terrorizing one family into submission in order to use their flat as a base for operations. Then they discover they’re pinned down there by the convergence of enemy forces.

The camera stays well away from the Iraqis moving toward the building down dirt roads and across shabby rooftops, the better to dehumanize them. But even in extreme long-shots, there’s no disguising the fact that the enemy are all bareheaded, on foot, and wearing T-shirts and hoodies and jeans, going up against massively armed and equipped American soldiers bulked up by body armor and helmets and covered by military jets roaring overhead and huge tank-like military vehicles coming to their rescue.

It’s such an unfair fight, it’s amazing that the film isn’t some kind of satire of contemporary American warfare. There seems to be a general sense of astonishment among the SEALs that this mission is actually turning into a battle instead of a casually brutal cakewalk. A couple of artfully thrown Iraqi IEDs (improvised explosive devices) result in one dead American and two seriously injured ones. The remaining trapped Americans are terrified, waiting for the armored vehicles — called Bradleys, for you war nerds out there — to show up and rescue them. The vehicles are minutes away! Can they possibly hold out till then? Or will they be besieged by a two-dozen skinny Iraqis in hoodies?

No use hoping that this will turn out to be a Stanley Kubrick–like experiment in using actual documented military language and practices in order to savage them in an annihilating black comedy. Warfare is all played straight, almost as straight as the hilarious Dr Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964). But sadly, in this case, humorlessness in representing American madness doesn’t connote black comedy, just more phony war-is-hell theatrics.

Glowing reviews like the one in the New York Times praise the way the film is a “tough, relentless movie about life and death in battle” that is seriously antiwar rather than offering cheap war movie thrills. The headline claims Warfare “refuses to entertain” — we’re talking about a movie that keeps viewers on the edge of their seats for almost the entire running time wondering if our brave boys will get rescued. Perhaps it’s not as hokey an entertainment as some old John Wayne movies, but it’s very much an entertainment in the new “you are there,” real-time, immersive war spectacle that’s been building for decades in movies, television, and video games. Plenty of “first-person-shooter” tension plus the display of realistic combat wounds, blown off limbs, and horrible body-eviscerating gore that CGI makes possible powered Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down (2001), Band of Brothers (2001), Call of Duty (2003 till now), and so many other screen entertainments.

Director Samuel Fuller, who served as an Army infantryman in WWII and came home with several medals for bravery under fire as well as war wounds — a Bronze Star, Silver Star, and Purple Heart — made some tough-minded and much-admired war films such as The Steel Helmet (1951) and The Big Red One (1980). He also made a famous comment that in order to give audiences a genuinely realistic sense of combat, you’d have to shoot at them every so often from behind the screen.

But one of his less-famous quotes, full of contempt for faux-realistic and sickeningly dishonest war films from every nation, laid out what was actually required of anyone working in mainstream film industries when it came to representing war:

The whole-truth war was unfit to shoot. Expurgated war that’s fit to shoot glorified, romanticized, musicalized, propagandized, tomfoolerized, canonized the dead, wounded, paralyzed, insane. Transforming real war to reel war, the film cannibals in every country, aggressor or attacked, stirred their pots and made fairy-tale combat stew.

I wish Warfare was the last American war film I ever see. But it’s so popular a genre, that’s unlikely. I wonder how long it’ll be till I read the promotional hype for the next film promising an absolutely realistic and immersive experience of combat, based on somebody’s first-person account of a battle that actually threatened the lives and limbs of American soldiers? Not long, I’ll bet.

War is hell, all right, especially at the movies.