"Everything" But Nothing, On Purpose
A24's Warfare and the return of the decontextualized America.
“Everything is based on memory,” read the initial marketing materials for Warfare, the latest release from A24 and co-directors Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza. It’s a simple pitch, but a striking one; meant to alert potential filmgoers that this is a true story from the mind of Iraqi war veteran Mendoza, lending his first-person experience to the reality of the spectacle promised by the one-word title.
The film, a presumably real-time autobiographical retelling of the harrowing rescue of Mendoza’s unit from an Iraqi warzone in 2006, is equally straight-forward. It is the visceral, no-frills experience that you expect, but I kept going back to that marketing tag:
“Everything is based on memory.” No, actually — everything isn’t.
With Warfare, Garland and Mendoza seek to create a vacuum, a contextless cacophony of violence meant to engross the viewer in the material reality of a military firefight and the camaraderie required to escape one. In this regard, the film is a resounding success. However, in obscuring any details about why they were there and who they were fighting, it condemns itself to being yet another deeply incurious American military propaganda piece unable to square the humanity it wants to imbue its subjects with and its unquestioning glorification of their actions.
Much like in his previous A24 project Civil War, Alex Garland’s use of sound and silence is arresting. Particularly in the moments of quiet waiting, coded check-ins, an errant quip and fast-moving military jargon are all soundtracked by whisps of wind and ambient street noise before all hell breaks loose. It’s in this downtime where Warfare spends a lot of personality capital, showcasing its young, fresh-faced stars in various states of what I can only describe as vigilant repose.
The soldiers are introduced singing and dancing to the EDM hit “Call on Me” by Eric Prydz, in uniform. Actually, not only in uniform but in full battle gear, humorously juxtaposing their jovial pop sing-along with the lethality of their imposing figures. Immediately after, we see them commandeer a two-family home and force its occupants into a small bedroom. The two families (who go unnamed in the narrative and faceless in the actor-vs-real-life-counterpart curtain call) huddle in terror while our songbirds set up their base of operations.
In a word, I find Warfare insidious. Everything can’t be based in memory because a memory can’t hold everything. That little music video at the top? That’s an intentional slice of everything, perfectly placed to endear the viewer to these men so that, when an IED claims their legs, our sympathies don’t redirect to the innocent family they’re holding hostage. But, to Ray Mendoza (the film’s primary creative force, who also appears in the film portrayed by D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), that context complicates his truth in ways he finds unhelpful.
Speaking to the Associated Press, when asked about why the film doesn’t contend with the larger Iraq War, Garland said:
“Why does reality need something bolted on alongside it?” Garland said. “If everything has an agenda, where’s the discussion? Where is the discussion if everybody is planting flags? As we can see in our lived life for the last few years, it doesn’t lead to discussion, it just leads to encampment. And I don’t want to participate in that.”
That’s why I called it insidious. Because that vacuum Warfare is desperate to create is dropping into a world where a general backlash to context and detail is consuming America and the world in frightening ways. This American film, from an American film distributor, stripping this story of any larger understanding of the conflict that it depicts serves to obscure the devastating impact these soldiers had on the nameless Iraqi family and that the U.S. Military had on the entire region.
It’s also difficult not to count the film’s casting and choice of distributor as co-conspirators in these efforts. In enlisting six or so years of Internet Boyfriends™ (“Riverdale” & May December’s Charles Melton, Netflix heartthrobs like To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before’s Noah Centineo, Joseph Quinn of “Stranger Things” and "Heartstopper” alum Kit Connor, etc), it aims to endear a younger audience — whose recollection of the “War on Terror” is fuzzy at best — to its primary perpetrators. The backing of auteur studio du jour A24 is meant to signal a dubious air of prestige. All of these elements converge to decontextualize the Forever Wars and reaffirm a Bush-era idea of the morally unassailable American military heroism.
For all of its (admittedly expert) technical mastery and visceral sequences of bullets, blood and bones, one can’t help but see a parallel between Warfare’s desire to depoliticize the deeply political and the current presidential administration’s attacks on education and rolling back of official recognitions of Black American history. The mission to scrub American history of the late 20th and early 21st centuries’ multi-cultural expansion of it has been a decades-long project and capital follows culture. American conservatism is once-again its primary cultural aura and not even the likes of Hollywood tastemaker A24 can resist.
Taken as advertised, Warfare is incredibly well realized. Your ears will ring. You will twist in your seat at the sight of mangled flesh. But nothing here is actually new. Its press and marketing materials would have you believe that there was novelty in its simplicity; that the idea of a military outfit being a “band of brothers” is some sort of revelation.
In reality, it comes across thematically stunted; its intentioned emptiness recalling Mendoza’s last notable Hollywood effort, Act of Valor, a critically panned propaganda film that told a fictional story using Mendoza and other actual military personnel as its stars. The whole affair shakes you in all the way it intends to but it’s revealingly current that it doesn’t ever try to tell you anything.
It’s “everything” but nothing, on purpose.
Warfare is now playing in theatres nationwide.
Distributed by A24, co-directed by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, and starring D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn, Kit Connor, Noah Centineo, Henry Zaga, and Charles Melton.