Where the Boys Are: WARFARE

The soldiers burst into a house and shuffle the civilians to the side. The civilians don’t even become characters. This is a movie about the men with guns. They set up a stakeout shouting jargon and tersely staring down the barrel of their guns. They talk over their radios. They look warily out the windows. They wait. This is Warfare, a movie set in Iraq in 2006. It tells a very small story. There are a handful of military men—boys, really, with fresh faces and dewey eyes and a sense that, if not for their training and ranks, they’d be in the club. The opening scene shows them bopping around to the electronic dance hit “Call On Me,” a very mid-aughts reference. That’s also the only scene of happiness. The rest of the film is about fear and futility. They’re hunkered down in this random home, a place of shattered domesticity. The enemies are encroaching. A trap is set. Suddenly, they’re pinned down, with danger on all sides. A few are wounded, screaming in agonizing pain. Others’ pain is internal, mental. Still others are dead straight away. They all wait as the minutes tick by, with an agonizing wait filled only with fumbling attempts to help each other survive, and with desperate counting down the time elapsing before reinforcements can arrive. This spare, stripped-down war movie is advertised as coming from actual memories of service members who lived through these moments—a few harrowing hours in a larger conflict.

In its telling, it becomes the story of the entire Iraq War in miniature. It begins with invasion easily accomplished, then a difficult stay that grows violent and scary, before ultimately ending with a messy withdrawal leaving all the worse for wear. (The final shots of Iraqis carefully stepping through the debris of their neighborhood are an especially sharp closing note.) The film proceeds in extremely precise moments calibrated for experiential momentum, both the long stretches of procedural waiting, and the sudden thumping terror of gunfire and explosions. The characters are a blur of familiar and unfamiliar faces, and some familiar faces that are barely recognizable in their combat grimace and anonymizing uniforms. Boyish young actors including Joseph Quinn, Michael Gandolfini, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, Noah Centineo, and Charles Melton are totally enveloped in their roles. They form a tight unit as characters who fall back on training, with flickers of personality subsumed by the urgent need to do the next right thing. Writer-director Alex Garland, with Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza serving as his co-writer and co-director, has made a technical and even clinical war movie that succeeds in conjuring a hellish look at what the monotonous unpredictability of war does to a body. Garland’s usual interest in the fragility of men and of systems, through movies like Ex Machina and Civil War, here finds another gripping expression. Here’s the story of a whole war in just a few well-observed stretches of chaos rushing in where control falters.