The climactic sequence in last year’s “Civil War,” a movie about an imagined military conflict in the United States, was unusual — and not only because it depicted insurgents storming the White House, breaching the Oval Office and assassinating the president.
It was also action shown in a way that films do not often depict. The gun-toting fighters communicate constantly about needing to reload. They awkwardly trade off shooting down hallways. Their rhythm is observably different than what moviegoers are used to.
The movie’s writer and director, Alex Garland, whose previous work includes “Ex Machina” and “Annihilation,” had given the scene’s reins to Ray Mendoza, a U.S. Navy veteran of the Iraq War turned Hollywood military consultant. Mendoza had used combat veterans as extras.
“When you saw veterans, in effect, directed by a veteran, something came out of it, which was something that I hadn’t really seen in cinema,” Garland said in a recent interview.
It gave Garland an idea. What if, he proposed to Mendoza late into the postproduction of “Civil War,” the two men made a film together, this one entirely depicting combat without typical cinematic trappings like compressed time, character study or traditional plot structure? What if the movie were just 90 minutes of war?
“Warfare” (in theaters), written and directed by Garland and Mendoza, is the realization of Garland’s ascetic thought experiment. It depicts a real incident that took place in November 2006 in the Iraqi city of Ramadi, a little west of Baghdad, the day after Mendoza’s platoon of SEALs had taken over a private house in the night to surveil the area. Fighters from the Iraqi branch of Al Qaeda shot at them, tossed a grenade into the house and detonated a roadside bomb as the SEALs attempted to evacuate a wounded member — an exceptionally intense hour and change.
The script was sourced entirely from Mendoza and others’ memories. They insisted as a rule that, as the film’s tagline has it, “everything is based on memory.”
Mendoza had come to trust Garland for retaining in the final cut of “Civil War” so many of the realistic tics he had installed — things “nobody else had really noticed,” Mendoza said in a joint interview with Garland over Zoom, referring to other filmmakers he has worked with. “And the ones that did notice it, they didn’t choose to put it in the movie.”
“Warfare” is credibly an attempt to depict its titular human activity as it is really experienced. Absent are expository dialogue, discussions about the U.S. military’s aspirations, monologues about life back home. Instead the SEALs jot down notes of what they see outside the house. They urinate into empty water bottles. They accidentally leave things behind. They run out of dip.
When the violence comes, there is no warning — no camera angles, edits or soundtrack that might cue the viewer. After a large explosion, there is an eerie silence that reflects the experience of its victims.
“It’s memory-based and it’s subjective,” Garland said..
“I don’t think we can say everything you see is true,” he added, “but what we can say is everything here is honest.”
To play the SEALs, Garland and Mendoza cast several of this moment’s most buzzed-about young actors: Cosmo Jarvis (FX’s “Shogun”), Charles Melton (The CW’s “Riverdale,” Todd Haynes’s “May December,”), Kit Connor (Netflix’s “Heartstopper”), Will Poulter (FX’s “The Bear,” Hulu’s “Dopesick”), Noah Centineo (Netflix’s “To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before”) and Michael Gandolfini (who plays Tony Soprano, the role immortalized by his father, James, in “The Many Saints of Newark”). Mendoza is played by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, nominated for an Emmy for his lead role on FX’s “Reservation Dogs.”
The actors underwent an abbreviated Basic Underwater Demolition/SEAL course and weapons training. They spoke to people who knew the men they were playing and, in some cases, the men themselves.
Jarvis, who plays the wounded sniper Elliott Miller — to whom the film is dedicated — spoke to Miller’s father before meeting Miller himself on the set, a Ramadi streetscape recreated on a former airfield outside London.
“When he did show up, it was pretty profound,” Jarvis said on a video call.
“I find a lot of specialized professions fascinating,” Jarvis added, “but this one is unique, because the stakes can be the ultimate stakes. That’s something that as a civilian it’s hard to get your head around. We just don’t have the understanding these guys have.”
Seeing the incident — much of which Miller is unable to recall — brought to life moved Mendoza to tears. For viewers sitting in comfortable theaters far from the world’s battlefields, Garland hopes the film’s fidelity to the platoon’s testimonies earns it credibility, even when some illustrative and true stories did not make the final cut because they did not occur within the precise time period the film captures.
“You have some faith, which is, if we stick to our rule, we lose this, but something else comes,” Garland said. “What comes is the audience’s trust that what they are seeing is something that does not have an agenda floating around it. It is just a faithful attempt.”
