In “How to Tell a True War Story,” an entry from his influential short story collection The Things They Carried, Tim O’Brien writes that “In any war story, but especially a true one, it’s difficult to separate what happened from what seemed to happen.”
Throughout the story, O’Brien cycles through self-doubt while recounting anecdotes from his time in the Vietnam War, emphasizing that the subjective nature of war stories defies fact-checking, moral clarity, and in some cases even language itself. “Sometimes it’s just beyond telling,” he writes.
This is a lesson that Navy SEAL-turned-filmmaker Ray Mendoza seems to have learned as well. His new movie Warfare, which he co-wrote and co-directed alongside Civil War and Arrival filmmaker Alex Garland, begins with a title card that reads, “Based on Memories.” Set in 2006, the autobiographical film follows Mendoza (played by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai) and his fellow Navy SEALS as they take over a family home in Iraq’s Ramadi Province.
Warfare is rarely as absurd as anything in Tim O’Brien’s postmodern stories. But its emphasis on the subjectivity of war allows Mendoza and Garland to cut through the political and economic issues surrounding the Iraq War to instead focus on the experience of war in the moment, and the humanity within it.
According to a maxim often attributed to the French filmmaker François Truffaut, there’s no such thing as an anti-war movie, as the spectacular nature of cinema makes even the horrors of war look exciting and valiant. On a visual level, Warfare does nothing to disprove Truffaut’s point. The film opens with an oddly aggressive shot of a woman’s butt in tight-fitting lycra, a scene from an exercise video that the SEALS watch at some indeterminate point setting off on their mission. The scene plays like a sort of surreal prologue,with no clear connection to the rest of the film.
But once the SEALs begin their mission, it’s hard not to be taken in. When one of their snipers (Cosmo Jarvis) is injured by a grenade, Officer in Charge Erik (Will Poulter) calls in an evacuation, leading to increasingly violent escalations as the Iraqis fight back against the Americans.
Mendoza and Garland strip these events down to their core. None of the characters are given backstories, and some aren’t even given names. We know nothing about how this mission fits into the U.S. military’s larger strategic goals, nor about Iraqis’ defensive strategy. The plotting is minimal, with the film focusing instead on engrossing real-time scenes of war. After an explosion destroys an American vehicle in one scene, limbs lay on the ground and stay there for the duration of the film, just one more piece of detritus. During an extended and gory scene halfway through the film, medics attempt field surgery on an injured soldier while other soldiers repeatedly stumble over his shredded leg.
Yet visceral as these visuals are, they won’t truly unsettle anyone familiar with the war movie canon. It’s now been more than twenty-five years since Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan set the standard for realistic depictions of violence and what weapons of war can do to the human body. While Mendoza and Garland match and perhaps in some cases succeed Spielberg’s skill in this department, Warfare’s graphic violence ultimately comes across as simply another technical element of its genre, no more impactful than torture scenes in a Scream or Saw movie.
But while their use of graphic visuals does not succeed in immersing viewers in the battle, Mendoza and Garland find a more effective tool in Warfare’s sound design. Warfare is filled with noise; not music, which is completely absent from the film apart from the opening and closing titles, but rather, the sounds of battle and their impact on soldiers and civilians alike. A ripping sound follows jet fighters as they tear by. The targeted Iraqi homeowners, a family of two adults and two children, cry in the back bedroom, sequestered, as the Americans invade their house. Gunfire and explosions crack through the din.
Three instances of sound stand out in particular. The first is that of an American soldier, played by Joseph Quinn, wailing after his legs are destroyed in an explosion. Gruesome as his aforementioned wounds are, it’s the sound that stays with viewers more than the sight, because Mendoza and Garland never let the wailing stop, even once the soldiers’ blood and guts are no longer on screen. It continues long after the soldiers have fallen back from the explosion, through the continuing gunfire and the other SEALs’ attempts to communicate with their superior. The sound refuses to stay in its place, lingering long past the point at which the audience has made sense of its relation to the accompanying visuals—past the point of utility. It just continues.
Breath is the great equalizer of Warfare. Its attention to breath carries viewers through the film, from the outset, when one soldier exhales in boredom before the fighting has begun, to the heat of the moment, when another coughs while trying to control his breathing as he’s ordered to remain calm. In one moment, a soldier suddenly draws a deep breath as he jolts back to consciousness, shocking the friends who thought him dead. Soldiers or civilians, Iraqis or Americans, everybody breathes so long as they are living—a universal need that transcends the stakes of the conflict.
But just as Tim O’Brien wrote that “[a] true war story is never moral,” Warfare seems generally disinterested in the virtues of war and peace. The result could easily be read as a pro-war film that highlights the bravery of the men who sacrificed all to complete their mission. But such a reading would require that the viewer understand the purpose of the mission, which the film never spells out, leaving us no way of knowing whether their actions were worth the suffering they caused. When, late in the film, the Iraqi mother screams “Why?” as her house is invaded, the soldiers provide no answer—and ultimately, neither does the film.
Rather than spell out its politics, Warfare aims to present the experience as Mendoza remembers experiencing it—the film offers what O’Brien would call the “story truth,” rather than a more neutral or objective “happening-truth.” In “Good Form,” another story from The Things They Carried, O’Brien makes this distinction to argue that the play of facts is not a game, something done to underscore his cleverness as a writer, but rather a form, a structural decision to better convey his experiences. “What stories can do, I guess, is make things present,” he writes. “I can look at things I never looked at.”
Warfare is somewhat unique in its depiction of things that modern Americans would probably rather not look at, particularly the plight of the Iraqi family whose lives are torn apart by the soldiers. But it also features many staples of the war movie genre. The result is a film that neither fully subverts the war movie genre nor lazily retreads its standard narratives. Through its sound design and its foregrounding of subjectivity over fact, “story truth” from “happening-truth,” allows us viewers to acknowledge things we never acknowledge in war movies, especially the human cost of war.