I’ve seen a whole lot of war movies in my time, but ‘Warfare’, a recreation of a particular event during the Battle of Ramadi in Iraq, 2006, sets a new standard.

• The writer/director Ray Mendoza’s platoon-mate Elliott Miller, suffered a traumatic brain injury during this military operation, and lost all memory of the event.
• Part of Mendoza’s reason for making the movie was to show his friend those hours that he’s been unable to recall.
• Mendoza is played, in the film, by the up-and-coming-though-not-yet-famous D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai.
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Ray Mendoza is a military war veteran who’s been a technical consultant on a number of war movies, although this is the first film that he’s made, as co-writer-director with the filmmaker Alex Garland.

First up, it’s important to know that the film doesn’t have a plot, per se. It is, instead, a faithful recreation of an event – a slice – of the overall conflict that was the Battle of Ramadi. Ray Mendoza had been one of the marines involved in this particular incident, and he recently sat down with all of the soldiers who had been his comrades at that time, and pieced together all of their memories, in order for the film to be the most accurate clone of that day’s fateful events. Nothing, Ray Mendoza says, was added or subtracted, “for dramatic purposes”. Of course, there was no need to embellish the drama of these marines facing the brutality of the Al Qaeda insurgency.

So, what makes ‘Warfare’ somewhat revolutionary, amongst its peers? What makes it so relentlessly real? Firstly, the action takes place in real time, so when the soldiers are waiting in motionless silence, trying to figure out what the enemy has in mind, you feel the mounting tension, and you feel their fear, as each excruciating second passes. Secondly, the film has no score; no heroic symphonic suites to tell us how to feel. Thirdly, the film has no big stars, so we aren’t thinking, for example, “Oh isn’t Chris Pratt great as Soldier X?”

A further factor that sets this film aside from many war films, is that the run-of-the-mill battle-flick tends to gloss over injuries: a soldier may clutch his shot limb and wince, or he may die in a mercifully quick fashion. Here, however, we are spared no horrifically graphic close ups of wounds, and the injured soldiers’ anguished cries don’t conveniently disappear after a few minutes. We, the audience, are stuck in the same space as they are, and the screamed anguish persists, and penetrates our skulls. Finally, the fact that the film doesn’t have a traditional plot, leaves us, the audience, without that cosy security blanket of a nice, linear, Hollywood storyline that we can hide behind.

In short, ‘Warfare’ is artfully stripped down the bare bones of storytelling, recreating the tension, fear, and trauma experienced by those young men in that short but harrowing period. It’s a sterling piece of filmmaking, but, by Jiminy, it isn’t easy viewing.

Tat Wolfen is a multimedia communicator, entertainment commentator and leisure journalist. Tune in for Tat’s razor-sharp takes on the latest on stage and screen, every week on The Sandton Times Hour – Mondays at 7pm on 91.9FM or on a fine selection of the world’s leading podcast platforms. [Disclaimer: Views expressed by reviewers/contributors are their own, and do not necessarily reflect those of The Sandton Times and its ownership or management.]

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