WARFARE. Of the weekend’s offerings, Thunderbolts* is loudly being touted as a return to form for the MCU. It’s no secret that I don’t particularly care for the form, and despite the cast and crew of this latest noisemaker seeming more interesting and varied than the usual, I just couldn’t — or didn’t, if we’re being merciless in our honesty. Unfortunately, I was also unable to check in with the latest Nic Cage vehicle The Surfer, about which I know very little but remain somewhat optimistic.
And as we have yet to transition this column to a tangential repository of ’70s American crime programmer Blu-ray and 4k reviews, I feel compelled to comment on something at least somewhat contemporary, if not exactly current. This is Humboldt; we’re always at least a little late for everything. In this case, I’ve spent a disproportionate amount of time thinking (but not writing!) about Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland’s recent examination of life in combat. The movie has come and gone theatrically, of course, but merits seeking out.
Mendoza, a retired U.S. Navy SEAL arrives at writing and directing amid a second career as military advisor to Hollywood productions (including Garland’s transcendent, prescient, deeply disquieting Civil War, 2024). With Warfare, he tells a story taken directly from his own experience when, in 2006, his unit, tasked with providing overwatch to a U.S. Marine operation in Ramadi, Iraq, was partially blown up and effectively cut off from ground and air support.
The premise is a familiar one, especially for those of us indoctrinated by and enamored with war movies down the decades. But Warfare insists on adherence to the truth as perceived by the participants in the events, having been stitched together from the first-person accounts of those participants without the benefit (or detriment) of outside perspective or unifying narrative. It sets out to depict the experience of warfare from within and, to my eye, does so without fanfare or politicizing. A Deadline review calls out the movie as hawkish, “a vacuous and perfidious advertisement for military recruitment,” but I don’t think that could be farther from the truth. The argument could be made, of course, that a story about American military operations in Iraq, at a moment when imperialism and neo-fascism loom as horrifically as they do, could only serve as an endorsement of a certain stripe of political identity. That perspective dehumanizes the participants in such events, though, which is its own nefarious, all-too-easy mode of othering in which to slip.
Because the point of Warfare is that there is no glory in war and, by extension, nothing to “advertise.” Navy SEALS are the best trained, best equipped military units in the history of the world. But they are also composed of young people grappling with horrors unknown and unspeakable to the vast majority of us. They may be better able to comport themselves in situations of extremity, but they can hardly do so with the practiced detachment we have so often been presented with in traditional war movies. Instead, they operate on a barely contained wave of panic and dismay in a zone where death and dismemberment become normalized. As such, there is nothing to advertise, except that there is no glory in combat.
One of the keys to Warfare, especially in our era of consummate stunt-craft and fight choreography, lies in its refusal to compromise the fact that war, in its conduct, is defined by long periods of boredom brought to their end by total and uncontrollable chaos. There are no headshots or Elysian evocations of Greek myth — just smoke and small-arms fire and body parts in the dirt.
If we’re smart enough to look at as intended, Warfare flies in the face of Truffaut’s notion that there is “no anti-war film.” It is as matter of fact as a work of “fiction” possibly can be, refusing to shy from the truth of the matter, which is that war is indeed an encapsulation of humanity’s evils, a glimpse into the disarray that underlies all our fragile social contracts. And it is conducted, at the most fundamental level, by people who may or may not have money on the political shell-game that is its impetus. We don’t have to like it and we shouldn’t; very few of the people involved could say they do. But it is an immediate and intimate reality, and to have one story told about the ignominy and hideous normalcy of modern war is, to me, a vital step toward a greater co-understanding.
Warfare is undeniably a work of art, and thereby of artifice, but that is its greatest asset. Retold from a not-quite-comfortable distance by participants in its events, it can perhaps rise to a greater level of truth than even an immediate recounting or documenting of those events. It is synthesized but un-processed, its ingredients still raw and awful and undeniable. R. 95M.
John J. Bennett (he/him) is a movie nerd who loves a good car chase.
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For showtimes call: Broadway Cinema (707) 443-3456; Mill Creek Cinema 839-3456; Minor Theatre (707) 822-3456.
This article appears in Summer of Fun 2025.