{"id":10041173,"date":"2025-04-11T13:41:11","date_gmt":"2025-04-11T17:41:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/?p=10041173"},"modified":"2025-04-11T13:41:12","modified_gmt":"2025-04-11T17:41:12","slug":"warfare-review-alex-garland-and-ray-mendoza-deliver-a-stunner","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vanyaland.com\/2025\/04\/11\/warfare-review-alex-garland-and-ray-mendoza-deliver-a-stunner\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Warfare’ Review: Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza deliver a stunner"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I\u2019ve made no secret that I hated<\/em> Alex Garland\u2019s last two films, which saw the once-zany-brainy screenwriter forsake the talent that made him successful for directing, which made him a sort of martyr among film people. His adaptation of Jeff Vandermeer\u2019s Annihilation<\/em> was successful because it was, well, an adaptation: He could follow the story beats laid out in front of him (for the most part) and devote his focus to aesthetics. It scared Skydance, only surviving the whims of David Ellison\u2019s handpicked editor because Scott Rudin had final cut, but it did most of its money back and found an eager audience willing to roll with Garland\u2019s vibes. From there, he did what all aggrieved directors do and decamped to A24, where you can pursue your dreams unless you\u2019re David Robert Mitchell or the person behind Pleasure<\/em>. Yet he\u2019d been changed by the Annihilation<\/em> experience in more than just attitude. Both Men<\/em>, his garbage attempt at Cronenbergian feminist horror, and Civil War<\/em>, a controversy-courting whimper that aimed down its satiric iron sights at combat photojournalists, were inert spectacles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

These passionless provocations felt wholly incohesive as abstract visual art or story-centric narratives, and Warfare<\/em><\/strong>, a film Garland co-directed with former stuntman and military tech advisor Ray Mendoza, seemed like his Metal Machine Music <\/em>or Everybody\u2019s Rockin<\/em>\u2019. Thankfully, that\u2019s not the case, and the project feels tailor-made to bring out the best in both directors: Garland gets the chance to worry about aesthetics while someone else is steering the narrative ship, and Mendoza gets to tell his story in the big-budget fashion that comes with the name \u201cAlex Garland\u201d being attached to a project. That\u2019s no small feat given where Mendoza was nearly twenty years ago: crouched with his fellow SEALs inside a two-story house in Ramaldi, frantically trying to save the lives of two catastrophically wounded men. This isn\u2019t The Ray Mendoza Story<\/em> \u2013 indeed, there\u2019s a certain amount of valor in how little attention Mendoza draws to the fact that his younger self is a character in the film or that he would win the Silver Star for his actions on that day — instead, it\u2019s a glimpse into how terribly wrong things can go on the battlefield, a terse 90 minutes spent embedded inside his platoon as they come under siege.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This runtime ensures that we\u2019re given as few specifics about the men as possible, outside of a tersely tossed-out last name or two (also, it provides a certain level of privacy for Mendoza\u2019s fellow veterans who didn\u2019t want to be involved with the project, as glimpsed by the blurred and obscured faces in the end-credit comparison between the subject and the actor portraying them). Instead, Mendoza uses familiar faces to establish characters, much like in Kathryn Bigalow\u2019s Zero Dark Thirty<\/em> or Malick\u2019s The Thin Red Line<\/em>, and the situation is more than enough to stoke one\u2019s empathy. Every person in that house, from the officer-in-charge (Will Poulter) to the wounded men on the ground (Cosmo Jarvis and Joseph Quinn) to Mendoza (D\u2019Pharoah Woon-A-Tai) to the poor civilian family trapped in their bedroom as strange men scream in pain and gunfire echoes all around them, is having one of the worst days of their lives. It was supposed to be a routine mission: Mendoza\u2019s team would go in, sweep this house in a hotly-contested neighborhood, and hold their position until the other platoon members would arrive. Small things go wrong: there\u2019s no air cover or armor at first, which annoys Poulter; it seems there\u2019s a lot of activity happening at a market across the street, all of which Jarvis can see from his sniper\u2019s perch on the second floor; and the Iraqi soldiers that are with them seem tense, as if they can sense that storm clouds are gathering.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A grenade tossed through the second-story window shatters the normalcy: no one\u2019s killed or even seriously wounded (Jarvis does catch a bit of shrapnel, though), but it becomes clear that they\u2019re made. A large force is gathering down the street, and the walls are closing in on them. Or, more accurately, the roof is starting to cave <\/em>in: Insurgents on the rooftops are making their way to the house. It becomes clear that Jarvis needs to get out of there, and Poulter orders a medevac. When the Bradley arrives, the team snaps into action, but right before he can be loaded into the vehicle, an IED goes off. The Iraqi soldiers are instantly killed; Quinn, the team\u2019s medic, is wounded and losing a lot of blood; and Jarvis, at first, looks like he\u2019s dead, both of his legs torn off by the blast. It\u2019s only after the two are dragged back into the house that Jarvis wakes up, howling in pain, needing someone to do something<\/em>. Poulter has a near-immediate crisis of conscience \u2013 he blames himself for the situation, an awful feeling only exacerbated by the blast\u2019s concussive force rattling his brain\u2014and it\u2019s all he can do to keep himself from falling apart in the moment, at least until back-up arrives. Caught in the middle, Mendoza and the rest of the team have to keep cool heads and pick up the slack: the wounded soldiers\u2019 lives depend on it. And so do their own.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

You\u2019d be forgiven for thinking that the somewhat austere nature of this story is merely just \u201ccompetence porn,\u201d in which strict procedure and tactical training saves the day, but Mendoza and Garland make Warfare<\/em> into something that feels astonishingly real, as if it were, like Mendoza intends, plucked straight from one\u2019s memory. The style that Garland developed for Civil War<\/em>\u2014 the dreamlike moments in the middle of a warzone, in which the moment slows down to an agonizing crawl and the landscape is turned upside down, like when the IED goes off and the POV characters wander in a smoky haze before precarious reality returns\u2014 is a major asset here rather than a hindrance as it was there. This is only possible because of Mendoza\u2019s commitment to the facts of the platoon\u2019s story, where this aesthetic enhances the apparent commitment to a form of realism into an honest perspective. The action is understated yet informed by the rigor that comes with experience, and the tension never quite lets up, even after the rescue. There are no triumphant horns or cheers: just the realization that these men, the ones we see at the beginning, cheering and jeering to a 280p stream of Eric Prydz\u2019s \u201cCall on Me,\u201d have been forever changed by the nature of combat.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We once had a cultural interest in bringing veterans into the filmmaking process (look at the career of Audie Murphy, who started as himself in a movie about his feats in Europe) or immersing filmmakers in combat (Mark Harris\u2019 Five Came Back<\/em> is a good depiction of Hollywood\u2019s mobilization to help with the war effort in WWII), but as after Vietnam and the transition to a volunteer military, the kind of culture-wide experience of conflict disappeared. After all, vets were too small of an audience to be served explicitly by mass entertainment without another hook attached. The type of cultural moment we experienced when Saving Private Ryan <\/em>came out \u2014 where men were shaken and brought to tears by the approximation of their experience as realized through modern cinema\u2014 is a remote possibility now, barring some horrible future conflict that no one wishes for us to suffer through for the sake of clippings in USA Today<\/em>. Yet that makes a film like Warfare<\/em> all the more remarkable and essential. It bridges a wide gap between sectors of the audience, between those who were there and those who weren\u2019t, reflected in the makeup of the two directors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Mendoza may have never gotten this chance if Garland hadn\u2019t intervened at the right time with the offer to direct a scene, and we\u2019re all richer due to their collaboration. It shouldn\u2019t have to be this way, but the socioeconomic realities of the modern military make it exceptionally difficult for people in similar positions to get that chance when a producer\u2019s kid is competing with them for the same limited pool of funding. Atomization leads to estrangement, and as those barriers become harder to cross, we lose the ability to get films like this one. So, no matter how much I didn\u2019t care for Garland\u2019s last two movies, he\u2019s a real one for helping to make Warfare<\/em> and getting this real talent\u2014 Mendoza\u2014 to the screen.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I\u2019ve made no secret that I hated Alex Garland\u2019s last two films, which saw the once-zany-brainy screenwriter forsake the talent that made him successful for directing, which made him a sort of martyr among film people. His adaptation of Jeff Vandermeer\u2019s Annihilation was successful because it was, well, an adaptation: He could follow the story beats laid out in front of him (for the most part) and devote his focus to aesthetics. It scared Skydance, only surviving the whims of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":48,"featured_media":10041176,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[19452],"tags":[10747,12878,20180,24029,26409,35576],"class_list":["post-10041173","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-filmtv","tag-a24","tag-alex-garland","tag-film-review","tag-good-movies","tag-header","tag-warfare"],"yoast_head":"\n'Warfare' Review: Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza deliver a stunner<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"The pair of co-director's excellent 'Warfare' is the kind of war movie we don't get too many of anymore.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, 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