Warfare (2025)
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Warfare Movie Review
Warfare is a 2025 war film directed by Alex Garland and starring Will Poulter among many others. It is a very bad movie.
A surveillance mission goes wrong for a platoon of American Navy SEALs in insurgent territory in Iraq. This is yet another disappointing film from writer-director Alex Garland. This filmmaker once got the Simbasible Award for Best Director, but is now increasingly becoming one of my least favorite directors. This is his second worst movie, only better than the horrendous ‘Men’.
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There is so much that you can do and say in a film about the war in Iraq. How the American people were tricked to believe that they should be waging war in that country for no reason at all. You could also showcase the terror that the US soldiers left on the Iraqi soil and the effects of American nationalism and interventionism. So yes, this is a potent subject for political discourse, but Garland did none of that, opting instead to repeat the frustrating ambivalence that he employed in ‘Civil War’.
He had absolutely nothing to say about this war or its impact. The movie is empty of any meaning or purpose. You could say that it’s about the trauma and horrors that soldiers experience in these conflicts and it’s certainly about that, but even in that area it isn’t effective given that we don’t care about any of these people.
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Imagine this cast of well-known, promising young British actors – Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor etc. – and imagine this film entirely wasting all of them on underdeveloped characters who are basically non-entities. I heard a lot of screaming and crying throughout this movie, but I did not care in the slightest as I couldn’t even distinguish between their faces, let alone be invested in their story.
Warfare is technically polished for sure, but unlike contemporary critics I do not watch films for technicalities, but for meaningful storytelling and emotional engagement first and foremost, which this one couldn’t offer me. There is a distinct lack of detail here that plagued this production in particular – what is this mission that they are on all about? What is its purpose? And what are any of these soldiers doing or going through?
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I understood none of it and I did not care to understand, which is even worse. I wouldn’t call this movie nationalistic, but it’s certainly very problematic to only depict the plight of American soldiers and once again ignore the Iraqi ones.
When it comes to directors, has there ever been a bigger fall from grace than in the case of Alex Garland? I don’t think so. He initially made two incredible science fiction films and then shifted his focus to military films and in the process he lost me completely. Warfare is his second worst effort so far, a film that is stripped of any meaning in its goal to be painfully realistic. The cast of young actors assembled for this production is excellent, but they were all wasted on these indistinguishable non-entities. They were so underdeveloped that I didn’t care for their plight at all. The worst offender here is its apolitical and ambivalent approach, which is unacceptable for this particular subject that should be tackled in a politically charged and sophisticated manner. Once again we get an American movie from the US soldiers’ perspective, a film that entirely ignores the Iraqi perspective and that evades to criticize American military in the slightest. It’s not directly nationalistic, but in its refusal to tackle these issues, it can certainly be thought of as such.
My Rating – 2
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