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‘Warfare’ Review: Alex Garland Co-Directs (With an Iraq War Veteran) a Film That Purports to Show Us What War Is Really Like. But Has He Just Left Out the Story?
It skillfully captures a sliver of experience that unfolded during the Iraq War. Yet it's stripped of drama and "shaped" cinematic excitement.
It simply plunks us down, on a very black and silent night, in an empty residential neighborhood in Ramadi Province, Iraq, where a team of Navy SEALs, along with two Iraqi scouts and two Marines, have arrived to help ensure the safe passage of ground forces in the area the next day. One of the key characters, Elliott Miller (Cosmo Jarvis), who with his smirk and mustache resembles a frat-house Freddie Mercury, is the group’s trained sniper, and he sets up his four-foot-long rifle on a table, with a rug underneath it, lying prone as he (and the movie) peer through the gun sight at the Iraqis who are mingling across the street. Will Poulter, as the team commander, does his inscrutable noble-scowl thing, and good actors like Charles Melton and Michael Gandolfini make their presence felt, but ultimately we’re standing back and watching them; that’s the downside of the film’s “objective” method.
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