Overwhelming ‘WARFARE’ A Gonzo Descent into Garland’s Hellish Sandbox

Warfare, the immersive Iraq War survival thriller from Navy SEAL veteran and first-time filmmaker Ray Mendoza and co-writer/co-director Alex Garland, is a blisteringly intense procedural experience. On one hand, it’s an incredibly effective piece of transportive filmmaking—one that leans into both the numbing banality of war plans and its most barbaric excesses. Told through a real-time, boots-on-the-ground POV, the film drops us alongside a platoon of Navy SEALs tasked with infiltrating a seemingly innocuous position and establishing a sniper nest. That’s all the context we’re given. No grander mission, no tie-in to some greater geopolitical scaffolding—just a squad, a target, and a whole lot of code words. Which may very well be the point: a war without meaning, with boys playing at war.

The all-male cast is a truly elite ensemble of established and up-and-coming alpha talent, all of whom disappear into their beefy biceps and dust-caked fatigues. There are recognizable faces like Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, Noah Centineo, Cosmo Jarvis, Michael Gandolfini, and Charles Melton—familiar enough to spark recognition before they’re caked in dirt and blood and afflicted with the PTSD shakes. But we don’t know any of them. And that’s not necessarily a failure of Warfare’s character development; it’s kind of the point. Distinguishing one from the other becomes increasingly difficult—especially when they’re just silhouettes shooting into a dust cloud. We barely learn their names, much less any defining traits, but that’s a feature, not a bug. The anonymity demanded of soldiers erodes personalities. They are not individuals, as depicted here. Sure, some of them end up screaming in agony while others try to Humpty Dumpty their shredded limbs back together, but for all intents and purposes, they’re a single consciousness. A body of brothers. A war machine with a shared pulse.

The technical craftsmanship here is—unsurprisingly—fireworks. The sound design is among the most harrowing I’ve encountered in any war film, and that’s a genre that regularly earns its roses for just that. Extended silences after explosions, that piercing tinnitus drone, the muffled chaos of gunfire filtered through concussed eardrums—it’s not just an effect, it’s the text of Warfare, and it’s as much a character in the film as any of the boys rattling off their weapons. The firefights are equally brutal and effective: tactically staged, authentically precise, and clearly born from extensive consultation with people who’ve actually done this grim job (something confirmed in the post-credits scene). The result is a kind of visceral authenticity that’s hard to shake. It’s overwhelming, no doubt—but does that make it good? That may be in the eye of the beholder.

Much like Mendoza and Garland’s film doesn’t shy away from the authentic terror of live combat, it also doesn’t flinch from the gore. Limbs are shredded, bodies torn to pulp. The violence isn’t stylized—it’s born from experienced trauma. You feel it most when a soldier screams—not just in pain, but in existential protest, begging for time to rewind, just a few minutes back to when all their parts were intact. Morphine can’t do much when your legs are worse off than the dreaded accordion arm from Green Room. It truly is horrifying. Real. And made all the more sickening when you realize there’s no objective here—just another flex of American might. Kicking in doors. Turning homes into morgues. Because we can.

What remains murky is Garland’s perspective on any of this. He frames it all with a sort of clinical detachment—observational, almost journalistic. The soldiers are brave, sure, and likely heroes. But that nagging sense of futility gnaws throughout. We’re literally watching a group of frogmen bust into an Iraqi family’s home to set up a sniper nest and spy on the MAMs (military-aged men) across the street. It starts to feel less like strategy and more like a blood-soaked game. A deadly round of Call of Duty. I had similar issues with Garland’s Civil War—massive, provocative ideas handled with a frustrating lack of insightful geopolitical grounding. At best, it reads as disingenuous. At worst, possibly craven.

Warfare wants to honor the young men forced to play soldier while also interrogating the moral black hole they’ve been thrown into. That’s not an easy needle to thread. And while I admire the attempt to avoid making just another boilerplate anti-war film, there are moments where it feels less like commentary and more like a hyperreal reenactment—but what for, I’m not entirely sure. It is absolutely relentless. Overwhelming in every way. And if Mendoza and Garland’s goal is to remind us that this job is hell, well, mission accomplished. I purposefully never signed up for warfare, and after watching a movie named after it, I feel even more vindicated in that life choice. Perhaps Warfare should be required viewing for any young man considering enlistment—much like the compulsory “informed consent” videos women are forced to watch before getting an abortion. Equal opportunity state-sanctioned trauma.

CONCLUSION: Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland have crafted an Iraq War survival thriller worthy of the A24 mantle, leaning into a gonzo sense of immersive hyperrealism and never shying away from the physical and psychological impact of just a single skirmish. It’s a technical marvel, though one is left somewhat questioning the point of this highly immersive reenactment.