#27: WARFARE

 

STARRING: D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Finn Bennett, Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton, Noah Centineo and Michael Gandolfini. Writtten and directed by Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland. Budget $20 million. Running time 95 minutes.

Based on testimonies of the actual platoon whose experiences this film is a truthful re-enactment of. The film follows what happens when U.S. Navy SEAL platoon Alpha One takes over an ordinary Iraq one story house in Ramadi prior to the Battle of Ramadi. The film takes place in real time to give it an massive dose of reality, as if experiencing what is about to unfurl in ghastly close-up gory detail isn't immersive enough. What follows is the platoon trapped and fending off repeated attacks as they desperately wait to be rescued, while the two families who live in the house have to shelter in a bedroom wondering if they'll live to see the morning, their plight isn't of any interest to the film makers, who are far more interested in our plucky bunch of heavily armoured warriors and their toys of warfare. 

Most of the war re-enactments I've ever seen usually consist of people dressed as either roundheads or cavaliers staging battles, skirmishes and sieges of the English Civil War, I hope this more modern updating doesn't become the norm, it'll make for some rather unsettling Bank Holiday weekends if we have to sit through IEDs, battlefield surgery and airstrikes. 

This isn't a fun watch, it's grim, ghastly and deeply immersive, you'll feel the shockwaves and find yourself tense and shell-shocked by the events. You'll watch a whole platoon of sweaty, gear-ladden troops besieged and shreded by mostly unseen enemy, who when they are revealed, look nothing more than a group of sheep herders holding AK47s. 

It's loud, brutal and exhausting. But it's not a film, there's no usual cinematic structure, no story arc, or secondary story, no emotional beats or witty dialouge. Just a barrage of gun-fire, explosions, mayhem and battle field gore all in real time. It's truly hammering. And even now two days later I don't know how I feel about it. I see no reason to watch it again.

As an exercise in film making it's a masterclass, Alex Garland is proving to be a truly unique and impressive film maker, but for me this has no emotional core, and because it's so real there's no sense of it being a story in the true sense of the word, it's a clever warts-an'-all re-enactment which seems obsessed in making sure that the exact number of pebbles on the road are correct. It's hard to work out who's who and ultimately the relief you finally feel when the last bullet is fired is the true highlight of the film, because you never need to watch it again.

That all said this is a technical tour-de-force and the realism borders on perfection. But I don't want that from my cinema I want escapism and larger-than-life experiences.  

7/10