I watched Alex Garland’s Warfare on my day off, and for whatever reason, it made me join Letterboxd. I’ll probably just throw the occasional brief note up there and see if it can’t help me lubricate my desire to watch more movies. But I may also occasionally duplicate, polish and expand upon those stray thoughts here on the blog… Case in point below…
Warfare is The Alamo in Iraq, and since I’m a sucker for finding the latest mutations of the American Western de facto interesting, I found it a decent watch.
Is that a lazy comparison? Potentially — and on making it, I began to wonder why.
What is most revealing about the film is how it is completely detached from any sort of wider context, and necessitates the filling-in of so many blanks. It’s narrative is brutally minimal, and as a result, it’s easy to assume it is choosing to rely entirely on a variety of assumed “givens” that any viewer might bring to it. Since it’s a film documenting a recent war, it assumes that we all know the context already — and we likely do — so chooses to simply tell a story about some men who got stuck in a pickle.
But this also makes Warfare a sort of Rorcharch test, as demonstrated by the other reviews on Letterboxd that see it as nothing more than your usual American propaganda. But this isn’t Clint Eastwood directing American Sniper — although it echoes it. In fact, its fragmented and detached nature makes it feel like a loose jigsaw piece that can be slotted easily into an American tradition of genre-film propagandising, but watched more generously, I think its choice to rely on the viewer filling in the surrounding lacunae is an effective provocation in its own right.
Placing the all-too-familiar Band-of-Brothers narrative to one side, I don’t see how this is any sort of positive portrayal of American involvement in Iraq. We see the soldiers do nothing but terrorise Iraqi civilians and give their local neighbourhood every reason to despise them. Their actions are also couched in the usual Islamophobia; an otherwise understandable animosity to their blatant disregard for their military impositions on the locals is framed immediately as men doing Jihad.
But the film’s lack of any wider political context, or its refusal to give any particular reason for why the soldiers are doing what they’re doing, also means the film itself has no overarching purpose. There’s no obvious mission, no goal, just routine ‘displays of force’.
Because no reason is given for why they are there or what they are hoping to achieve, the viewer again makes assumptions and fills in the blanks, but in suspending these presuppositions, all we have to draw upon is a first act of cold tedium followed by a second act of gore and suffering. It’s hard not to see this alone as a tacit critique of the war itself. It’s all tension, thrill and impenetrable codewords — but for what?
The film’s closing scene, which briefly shows the real persons whose memories are the basis for its narrative, is notably accompanied by Low’s “Dancing and Blood”, from their 2018 album Double Negative — an album of disintegrating songs described by Rich Juzwiak, writing for Pitchfork, as “a scowling and shellshocked response to Trump’s America”, and “an ambiguous, modern wonder”.
Alex Garland is no doubt going for something similar here. But there’s still something to be said for his shift from horror/sci-fi to modern warfare, which says a lot about society… War movies are the new containers for highly technical language and psychological limit-points — that is, for futureshock. This was a terrain formerly occupied by, for example, cyberpunk, where high tech meets low life. In a cunning reflection of where the world of tech has headed, our cyber present is no less a material reality lived by social dropouts, but these dropouts have since enrolled in the army. A life of tech and dirt isn’t lived so much on the streets of our world’s capital cities than it is lived exclusively by soldiers on battlefields.
Like the Low album it draws upon for its singular use of non-diegetic sound design, sitting before this ambiguity is uncomfortable, even masochistic. I remember going to see Low in London on the Double Negative tour at the Barbican and being shocked to hear that album’s beautiful songs untainted, allowing me to enjoy the album even more for the bold decision to re-present something beautiful in such a degraded manner. Warfare left me feeling similarly.
Perhaps it reflects the degradation of the world in which it is set — ours — a little too closely, and perhaps it could have been more explicitly political. It is understandable that may viewers may be left feeling like we’re long past the point of trying to make Iraq this century’s Vietnam. This film is no Apocalypse Now. But I also respect it for not trying to be that, for not milking the knowing perversity of a high-art anti-war film. In truth, it’s ambiguity is really where all of its richness lies, outside of the heroism and psychedelia we might be more used to.
Civil War was perhaps a more obviously interesting film, but I nonetheless enjoyed Warfare as a very different approach to contemporary conflict — perhaps even the exact opposite approach taken in Civil War, with its aching fascination with the spectacle of making history. That being said, I don’t feel great about having enjoyed it. But I respect the cultivation of that ambiguity.