The New Yorker:

Alex Garland’s latest film, which he co-directed with the former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, dramatizes a little-known 2006 episode from the Iraq War.

By Justin Chang

“Warfare” ends the way a lot of movies based on true events do: with a series of side-by-side photographs. Here are the characters you’ve just seen, and here are the actual people upon whom they’re based. This is standard bio-pic operating procedure, and it often smacks of mimicry porn, a chance to marvel anew at the actors’ skill, at the achieved resemblance between performer and subject. But “Warfare” isn’t a bio-pic—it is, you’ll be startled to hear, a war movie—and it cares not a whit for impersonation. Many of the real-life subjects, nearly all of them U.S. Navy seals, have had their faces blurred out in these photos, presumably for security and/or privacy reasons. The choice is in keeping with the movie’s method. It’s invested in process rather than personalities, and the performances aren’t just scaled down; they’ve been practically strip-mined of individuality. A closing dedication, “For Elliott,” is as jarring as it is touching. To single anyone out is almost an affront to the film’s spirit.

It begins not with a battalion of troops but, instead, with a shapely squad of female pelvises, gyrating and thrusting in an aerobics studio. The sultry 2004 music video for Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me” is playing on a screen before an appreciative audience of young male troops. War films are loaded with whooping eruptions of pent-up sexual energy; think of “Full Metal Jacket” (1987), in which a platoon’s encounter with a Vietnamese sex worker triggers a comedy of lusty one-upmanship, or “Jarhead” (2005), in which a sex-tape viewing party backfires, humiliatingly, on a lone marine. But in “Warfare” even the collective horniness feels mass-choreographed. The men sway together, indistinguishably, like a mosh pit of blue balls. You will recognize some of their faces; the best-known actors include Will Poulter, Noah Centineo, and Charles Melton, though only one of them, Poulter, has a significant role. But, after the film concludes, what you remember are the coördinated movements and gestures: how nimbly the men assemble into a formation, and how quietly they advance on a pitch-black night.

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