‘Warfare’ aims to be the most authentic Iraq War film yet

“Warfare,” the new film co-directed by Alex Garland (“Civil War,” “Ex Machina”) and former US Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, knows it’s going to give audiences a rough ride, so it starts off with a laugh. The nostalgic throbs of Eric Prydz’s 2004 hit “Call on Me” rise through the theater before it’s infamous video – a crotch-thrusting pastiche of John Travolta and Jamie Lee Curtis’s antics in 1985’s “Perfect” – appears on screen. (In IMAX, it’s quite something.) We’re seeing what a SEAL team is watching on a laptop screen at a military barracks near Baghdad. Suffice to say, they’re into it. These men, barely out of childhood, could be spring breakers if not for the fatigues and rifles. They go wild when the bass drops. The next time we hear a boom, it won’t be such fun. Culled from the memories of Mendoza and his former unit, “Warfare” is a taught retelling of a mission gone sideways during the Iraq War in 2006. Mendoza’s team was engaged in a surveillance mission in Ramadi when the house they were occupying came under attack, throwing the team into a fight for survival without the usual backup. The movie stars a Young Hollywood who’s who of internet boyfriends (Charles Melton, Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, Kit Connor, Noah Centineo and more) including “Reservation Dogs”’ D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai as Mendoza. But the film has no time for matinee idols or Hollywood heroism, casting them as highly competent cogs in a machine that prizes teamwork over individual valor. Garland and Mendoza, who met when the latter consulted on 2024’s “Civil War,” thrashed out a framework for the script, before interviewing members of the unit to flesh out the details. “It’s an exercise in trying to recreate a real sequence of events as accurately as possible,” Garland told CNN. “Were there discrepancies and conflicts in peoples’ memories? Absolutely,” he recalled. “Very often there were partial memories … then it became a sort of forensic reconstruction: If this thing is true and this thing is true, then that must also be true.” “We needed a very simple rule,” he added, “that the film would just include what happened.” The result is a movie with a laser-focused viewpoint and little to no exposition. There’s also plenty of military jargon, both befuddling and comical (“Is he peeking or probing?” one soldier earnestly asks about a combatant). Mendoza positions the movie as a corrective to so much of what he and other veterans have seen before. “Traditionally, the people who are making movies about war haven’t experienced it,” he said. (John Ford, John Huston, Oliver Stone and others might disagree, but in recent years the statement is broadly true.) Previous filmmaking about the Iraq War “oftentimes doesn’t connect with me, doesn’t connect with most veterans,” Mendoza added. “They may shoot something that’s really cool … but for the most part, (veterans are) like, ‘yeah, they got that wrong,’ or ‘that’s not how we talk,’ or ‘that’s not how the culture is,’ or ‘we’re being misrepresented in how we handle stress.’” Seeking to remedy this, the former SEAL put his cast through a three-week bootcamp ahead of production in the UK last year. The actors received weapons training, lessons in radio comms, tactical maneuvering and military first aid. “Ray is a hell of a teacher,” said Cosmo Jarvis, who plays Elliot Miller, to whom the film is dedicated. “The bootcamp did two things for us,” said Poulter, “it gave us a condensed technical skill set in order to play a Navy SEAL and it also bonded us all in an amazing way. So the emotional side of things naturally took care of itself.” “We probably spent eight weeks with each other,” recalled Melton. “It was 6am to 6pm every day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. We didn’t spend any time in the trailers, we were really just this family.” Violence and trauma Despite its trim 95-minute runtime, the movie takes its time to get going. That’s notable, argued Quinn. “Especially with Hollywood portrayals of war, or things of that nature, I think that there’s a melody or rhythm that filmmaking can fall into where nothing boring happens,” said the actor. In reality, “there’s so much downtime, and these men have to fill that downtime. The contrast between being idle and bored, and then being in a very perilous, dangerous situation, is quite interesting.” Unlike previous war movies that have dealt in the exceptional (think “Saving Private Ryan” and its mission to extract Matt Damon’s Ryan; “Black Hawk Down” and its headline-making raid gone bad; “The Hurt Locker” and its skilled and tormented bomb disposal expert) there’s a grim sense that what happened to the SEAL team in “Warfare” was commonplace. The violence, when it arrives, is brief, but its repercussions are explored in graphic and intimate detail. “The intimacy was shared,” said Quinn, whose character Sam is at the sharp end of things. “We were all there in the room … We weren’t alone in what we were doing. And that was a kind of beautiful thing to come out of a very violent context – quite dark, I suppose.” For Mendoza, the reconstruction was an opportunity to process the trauma of events two decades ago. “It’s a never-ending process,” he said. “Just because the war is over, it doesn’t mean that it’s over for us – in the sense of living with these things, or learning how to understand them, and learning how to convey them to people that you love.” “Once I got out of the military, a lot of these mechanisms that I used to function (in the Navy) didn’t necessarily serve me well when I got out. So there’s a lot of work to do on one’s self. Finding a new career in this industry – storytelling – I felt was therapeutic.” Mendoza has said he wanted to remind people that America’s wars are fought by its youth. It’s a point exemplified by fresh-faced “Heartstopper” alum Kit Connor. “I’ve just turned 21. I was 20 at the time of making it,” Connor said. “I look younger than most of the soldiers that you would see on the big screen.” Garland bristles at the idea the movie contains a message. When asked what the film wanted to communicate to audiences about the Iraqi people it features, the director shot back. “The film does not have the agenda you’re implying it does,” he replied. “It is not attempting to telegraph a message. It’s attempting to telegraph information, and it’s telegraphing the information in as honest a way as it can.” “Warfare” ends with a coda that I won’t spoil here, but it offers a moment of grace the film is crying out for after the action preceding it. It leaves an impression – though not as indelible as the one shared by the cast. In a nod to their new brothers in arms status and Prydz’s lyric, many of the actors got matching tattoos reading “call on me.” “(It) was something that was more of a symbolic expression that represented our bond,” said Melton. “Wherever we are in the world, our thing is you can call on me.” “Mine is on my left thigh,” he added. “Mine’s on my left thigh, too,” said Woon-A-Tai. Poulter, late to the party, said he would get his done within the next 24 hours. “I can guarantee it to you guys,” he said to them both, with more sincerity than anything Eric Prydz-related deserves. A day later, Poulter revealed he’d joined their ranks. Brothers in arms, legs; not the same boys that they used to be. “Warfare” is released in cinemas in the US on April 11 and in the UK on April 18.