Welcome back movie club! This week I’m going to talk about Warfare, which is written by US combat veteran Ray Mendoza. It’s always interesting when someone not in the industry is so involved with making a film, and it got great reviews, so I wanted to check it out. Generally, I don’t love war movies. They make me sad, they’re usually very raw and the brutality is too real for me. However, you can’t deny the power that their stories hold, and I think it’s a good way to learn about what happened. Anyways, let’s dive into Warfare.
The premise is a platoon of Navy SEALs that are in Iraq providing sniper cover and reconnaissance for ground troops in the area. The first 20 minutes or so are TENSE, but nothing happens. They’re waiting, shooting the shit, sweating in the desert, and looking out from a house they commandeered with the residents held captive inside.
The people clear the streets, and the troops know something is about to happen. Out of nowhere, a grenade is thrown into the building which rattles everyone and wounds their sniper, Elliot. They regroup and call for evacuation, but their rescue vehicle is bombed killing at least one of the soldiers and severely wounding Elliot and Sam. Elliot’s legs are torn to shreds, Sam is screaming for the next 45 minutes as his leg is also ripped apart.
They call for help, another SEAL team comes, and they fight it out to save the wounded group. Eventually tanks come to their rescue and everyone is evacuated out. The film ends by showing the insurgents coming out of hiding, an eerie quiet over the now destroyed city block as the family inside the SEAL’s house was also released to a decimated home. Not much of a recap, it’s hard to describe and feels borderline disrespectful for me to opine on what the soldiers were going through.
I’ll start by talking about the sound. It was LOUD, and I think this is a movie that needs to be seen in theatres. It would go from almost complete silence with a small ringing after an explosion, to deafening gunfire once the soldier would regain his bearings. The explosions, the gunfire, and the vehicle sounds made it feel like we were right there with them. At one point I was itching my eye when a grenade went off, poked myself so hard I’m still seeing blurry. I also never knew what a “Show of Force” was. Apparently, they just sweep over the battle with a fighter jet to scare the enemy. That’s so badass.
The acting was also top notch. Will Poulter is the man. To see him going from that goober in We’re the Millers, to the SEAL captain struck by trauma in this movie is genuinely great to see. He was great in The Bear as well, not so much in Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3. Joseph Quinn shined as well, just screaming in agony to the point where I felt his physical pain. He broke out in Stranger Things, since then has starred in Gladiator and will be starring in the upcoming Fantastic Four movie. Great to see talented actors getting the breaks that elevate them to stardom. Also, the SEAL leader who rescued them was played by Vanessa Hudgin’s partner in Bad Boys for Life. It took me awhile to place him, but I got it done.
The movie ends like a lot of war movies do, with an “In Memory Of” and photos of the actors with the real soldiers. This was different though. Other than Elliot, all the faces were blurred out and no names were given. A brutal reminder that these guys rarely get the credit, and are nameless, faceless tools of war for those who will take all the glory. They also showed a blurred-out picture of the family whose house they took, another reminder of all the nameless, faceless, victims of this war that suffered from other’s actions.
This really isn’t a movie that you can recommend to people. It’s not a run and gun typical modern war movie, and it will be extremely traumatic to a lot of the real military guys that are interested in this. All war movies are by nature “Anti War”. There is rarely any glory in war. It’s a gruesome, horrible way to die that has claimed the lives of young men since the dawn of man. Warfare embodies that better than almost anything I’ve seen. No amount of training, skill, or preparation could have stopped what happened. It isn’t an open field “fair” war, it’s guerilla warfare and IEDs. American kids spent the 2000’s getting their legs ripped apart fighting 6000 miles away and that just sickens me. My score for this is 8.4/10, it was really good.
PS: Reminder that the Iraq war was started by Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld to pump the American industrial war machine. All of this to make money from the blood of those American soldiers. I guess I have a different definition of patriotism than those scumbags did.
