Warfare isn't a war film. It's war.
Garland and Mendoza strip the genre of everything recognizable: no character arcs, no flashbacks, no patriotic overtures or emotional beats. There are no names to remember. No home to long for. No cinematic scaffolding to hold onto. What's left is the brutal machinery of combat - dry, immediate, procedural.
This is not the psychological descent of Apocalypse Now, nor the trembling humanism of Saving Private Ryan. It's more like being waterboarded with dust, sound, and confusion.
The camera is unflinching - tight, reactive, often handheld but never "shaky-cam" chaos. It moves with the soldiers, but never sentimentalizes them. There's no slow-mo. No meditative framing. Just bodies moving through smoke, clearing rooms, capturing buildings. The lens doesn't find beauty in destruction - it avoids it entirely. The few wide shots we get are just to show how small they are. How futile it all looks from a distance. The sound design is relentless: radios crackling over one another, gunfire echoing through narrow alleyways. There is almost no score, and when music does appear (Low's Dancing and Blood) it's droning, ghostly, anti-heroic. It haunts rather than elevates. The production design is chillingly effective. Everything feels lived-in and long-dead at the same time. You can smell the ash, feel the heat radiating off the concrete. The environments aren't stylized, they're decayed, abandoned, half-real. It feels like the war has already happened, and this is just the residue.
One of the final moments, set to the droning nightmare of Low's Dancing and Blood, shows a blurry portrait of an Iraqi family seconds before their home is destroyed. Not for shock. Not for plot. But because that is war-it happens, and then it's gone, and the image remains, smeared and indistinct.
Civil War framed the ethics of capturing violence. Warfare removes the frame entirely. There is no image here to interpret - just presence. Just event.
It's also one of the most immersive war films I've ever seen, precisely because it refuses to explain itself. The film doesn't care if you're lost. It wants you to be. Questions pile up. None are answered. Context is treated like luxury, one the characters (and audience) don't get.
By the final sequence, you feel exhausted - not thrilled, not moved - just emptied out. And then the film has the audacity to end on one word:
"Why?"
But it doesn't ask it to provoke. It asks it like a ghost would. Like a memory does. It's not a question. It's an echo.
Warfare is not a film you watch. It's something you survive.
9/10.
P. S
Having experienced Warfare in Dolby Atmos, I must emphasize how sonically overwhelming the film's opening sequence is - a moment of almost euphoric surrealism, as the soldiers lose themselves in the pulsating rhythm of Call on Me, the bass resonating so powerfully it felt like the theater roof was coming down. It's a scene of unexpected levity and collective joy, rendered with hypnotic energy and tonal audacity. Precisely this striking contrast - between the almost absurd vitality of the prologue and the film's emotionally pulverizing, desolate conclusion - marks one of the boldest and most jarring juxtapositions in recent cinema.
