A year after Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza depicted a harrowing dystopian future in Civil War, the duo is back with an offering for the 2025 movie calendar, and this one’s based on real events. Warfare follows a team of Navy SEALS on a mission in 2006 during the Iraq War and is based on Mendoza’s own experiences, and those who caught early screenings had visceral reactions. Now that critics have had time to sit with Warfare for a bit, let’s see what they’re saying.
Alex Garland’s Warfare features an ensemble cast including D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (as Ray Mendoza), Will Poulter, Kit Connor, Joseph Quinn and Charles Melton, who are executing a mission effectively in real time, which ratchets up the intensity. In CinemaBlend’s review of Warfare, Eric Eisenberg gives the movie 4 out of 5 stars, calling it an “awesome piece of work” for its “impeccable verisimilitude.” In his words:
It’s an utterly transfixing 94 minutes that flies by as it nails you to your seat in suspense, terrified of what may happen next. It makes no apologies for reality, and it doesn’t go through the process of making everything specifically cinematic with dumbed-down jargon, sweeping narrative developments or constructed character arcs.
David Rooney of THR says Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland have crafted a bold new landmark in screen depictions of combat that makes for can’t-look-away real-life drama. Warfare belongs alongside other nail-biting combat dramas like The Hurt Locker and Black Hawk Down, Rooney says:
Character detail is reduced to whatever behavior we observe in the men under pressure. There’s no gung-ho bravado, no talk of wives or girlfriends back home, no romanticization of war or political speechifying, no ‘U.S.A!’ jingoism, no exposition. What there is, instead, is raw feeling — fear and pain as much as courage, adrenaline, decisiveness and determination, along with disorientation as chaos escalates, often with minimal visibility. While the situation is too messy and the action too real for movie-ish displays of camaraderie, we’re aware at all times of the extraordinary degree to which these men are looking out for each other.
While the above critic likens Warfare to some of the best war movies, Jacob Hall says in SlashFilm’s analysis that the filmmakers’ latest project is beyond compare. It is, by design, the least exciting war film ever made, depicting a job that is tedious until it is terrifying. Hall gives it an 8 out of 10, writing:
There has never been a war film quite like Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare, which feels designed to discombobulate and disturb above all else. There is no real story here, no traditional plot, and certainly no character development — it’s purely experiential, a real-time descent into a chaotic hell that asks the viewer to witness, and feel, the pain, exhaustion, and sheer terror of an actual battle scenario. And it does so without ever flirting with even a single rousing moment, or casting a specific judgment. Warfare throws you straight into the smoke and the muck, and expects you to grapple with your personal reaction to the visceral carnage of it all.
Eric Goldman of IGN also rates it a “Great” 8 out of 10, writing that the film is incredibly effective at putting you into the middle of combat, evoking feelings of dread and terror usually reserved for the darkest horror movies. Goldman continues:
A darkly effective sensory overload, Warfare does a strong, stripped-down job of placing us into the midst of a notably intense and confined few hours of surveillance and combat. A strong cast of rising stars sells their characters’ mixture of fear and determination, while phenomenal sound design plays a big role in the immersiveness as we’re given a window into just how nightmarish and disorienting a combat experience like this can be.
Not every critic felt as connected to the action as the ones above. Owen Gleiberman of Variety argues that Warfare — while a skillfully made film — doesn’t portray the existential reality of war in a way that we haven’t seen before, and by stripping away the cinematic excitement in the name of authenticity, the audience remains detached. The critic continues:
Warfare presents itself as an immersive experience, and I think it will be lauded for being an immersive experience. To me, though, it was not. Watching it, I felt involved and detached at the same time. The film strips itself of most of the active elements that immerse us in a war movie — like, for instance, treating the soldiers as fully colored-in characters.
Either way, Warfare sounds like quite the intense, edge-of-your-seat moviegoing experience. If you want to check out this upcoming A24 movie, Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s latest creation will be storming onto the big screen on Friday, April 11.
