When I settled into my plush theater seat to view Warfare on its opening weekend, I had done no research about the film. I anticipated the standard Global War on Terrorism fare: good guys and bad ones in an epic struggle watered down for the palates of Americans desperate for a denouement, and maybe a sappy love story for good measure.
I have never been so grateful to be disappointed, even as the film kept me pinned to my seat, alternating between terror and tears for 95 nerve-wracking minutes.
Directors Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland have taken an electron microscope to the GWOT, highlighting a single engagement between U.S. Navy SEALs and insurgents in Ramadi, Iraq, in November 2006. Somehow, what they produced seems, to this civilian reviewer, a highly precise translation of the gritty, intense combat that dozens of veterans of both Iraq and Afghanistan have described to me over more than a decade.
In the opening scene, the viewer enters the SEALs’ world as they cluster together in full kit in a small wood-paneled room to prepare for an engagement. The SEALs are not poring over maps or loading equipment, but gazing at a laptop screen playing the 2004 music video for Eric Prydz’s Call On Me. A lithe, sweaty California blonde in a thong leotard leads an exercise class in suggestive thrusting motions. As the SEALs shout along, jumping up and down in time with the dance track, the scene flips to the nighttime silence of a Ramadi street.
Prydz video notwithstanding, Warfare has no musical score. The brilliant choice leaves viewers with no auditory cues to prepare them for whatever may befall the troops filtering down the deserted street. That lack of external stimulus amplifies the tension, heightening viewers’ senses as they seek out chaos that could arise from virtually anywhere or anyone. That mechanism allows Mendoza and Garland to turn 15 minutes of film showing the otherwise low-intensity inactive preparations that fill so many hours of a combat deployment into a constant onslaught of nerve-shattering dread and uncertainty as a smaller team of SEALs sets up operations inside a home they occupied during the evening hours.
Now in full daylight, the home’s inhabitants sit in a single room under the guard of two nationals. Several SEALs maintain contact with air support and track other ground units operating in their sector. In a separate room, real-life sniper Elliott Miller, portrayed by Cosmo Jarvis, notes several military-aged males “peeking” at their building.
The breathlessness of waiting for a crisis becomes the breathlessness of fear as the Iraqi nationals tell their SEAL counterparts that the speakers now blaring through the city are calling insurgents to jihad. Women and children flee the streets just as a grenade clinks to the floor and explodes.
The SEAL team’s casualty evacuation for a wounded Miller is interrupted by the blast of a hidden improvised explosive device.
The remainder of the film is a minute-to-minute breakdown as injured SEALs slowly recover from the concussive damage to remove two seriously wounded teammates and prepare to exfiltrate from their position under fire from enemy forces scattered along neighboring rooftops.
Warfare is based solely on the recollections of the SEALs who participated in the depicted operation. Their story demonstrates the effect the GWOT had on local partners, who were killed far more often than their American counterparts. About 177,000 local military and police partners in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq, and Syria were killed during the GWOT, compared with more than 7,000 U.S. troops and about 8,000 contractors.
One of the two Iraqi military personnel supporting the SEALs dies in the IED attack, his body torn open and blown in half. Though the SEALs retrieve a weapon lying near his corpse under fire, their dead partner is still in the street when they depart in four lumbering Bradleys.
Traditional villains are in short supply in Warfare, with the exception of an overzealous SEAL who arrives after the IED explosion, yelling, “Let’s f***ing do this,” while kicking the bloodied, misshapen leg of a horrifically wounded teammate.
No one SEAL emerges from the retelling as a Hollywood-standard hero, either. Instead, the film depicts the quiet professionalism of teams of U.S. military personnel who managed danger, trauma, and grievous physical injuries under duress during 20 years of the GWOT. This reminder of their sacrifice seems particularly poignant now, as the Department of Veterans Affairs, where they are supposed to receive excellent medical care in exchange for their selfless service, is set to return to 2019 staffing levels to enable federal budget cuts.
While viewers should be forewarned that they will find no love stories or glamorous moral lessons in Warfare, the film should be required viewing for all American leaders charged with sending U.S. troops into battle. Garland and Mendoza have carved themselves out a hallowed place in the GWOT-era film oeuvre for their barebones depiction of this era’s combat environment.
Beth Bailey (@BWBailey85) is a freelance contributor to Fox News and the host of The Afghanistan Project, which takes a deep dive into the tragedy wrought in the wake of the U.S.’s withdrawal from Afghanistan.