Warfare – Dir: Alex Garland (13th Floor Film Review)
Warfare is director Alex Garland’s latest boots on the ground account of a Navy seal operation gone awry, based upon the memories of Iraqi veteran and co-director Ray Mendoza, its an endurance test that lacks emotional payoff.
Starring: D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, Joseph Quinn, Cosmo Jarvis, Charles Melton, Finn Bennett and Noah Centineo
A platoon of Navy Seals requisitions the home of an unfortunate family in Ramadi, Iraq to serve as their command centre for the detection of potential insurgent activity in and around the town square.
For the first 20 minutes or so, director Alex Garland who brought us Civil War, delivers a masterclass in ratcheting up onscreen tension to breaking point.
Extreme closeups of sweat on brows and poised trigger fingers serve to create a sense of cloying claustrophobia.
It is clearly evident that something ghastly is going to happen at any moment and by the time it does, the tension is wound so tightly that it almost feels like a relief when all hell breaks loose in an explosion mortar and body parts.
At this point it would be remiss to not call out sound designer Glen Freemantle and supervising sound editor Ben Barker.
They have created a totally immersive experience where every crack of a bullet and explosion has you looking over your shoulder to make sure that you have not unwittingly stumbled directly into the line of fire.
The real issue here is that despite making the audience feel as though they are (literally) in the room where it happens, and even at an economical 95 minutes, the film lacks enough emotional heft or sense of engagement to carry it through it’s runtime.
To put it bluntly, I found it hard to care all that much.
The audience are never given the opportunity to get to know these men as anything other than “good looking dude in a uniform number one, two or three”. To the point that when the dead and severely injured start piling up it is extremely difficult to work out who is who, let alone feel any kind of emotional attachment to their fate.
I felt far more empathy for the terrified family thrust into the midst of the fray for no other reason than their home’s strategic vantage point.
From the midway point onwards it all starts to feel more gratuitous than groundbreaking. There is only so much unrelenting gore that an audience can be consistently walloped with before a degree of desensitisation and/or sensory overload sets in.
It all got too much for the two people who fled the cinema midway through our screening.
Realism is one thing, borderline unwatchable is another and, as my plus one for the screening dryly observed, “an hour of someone screaming in pain is more than enough for one week”.
A sentiment with which I wholeheartedly concur.
Jo Barry
Warfare opens in cinemas today. Click here for tickets and showtimes.
