So You Think War Is a Game? Watch Warfare

The new film Warfare, set in Iraq, may well feature the most harrowing and prolonged scream I’ve ever heard in my personal viewing history.

Elliott Miller, a sniper and medic, steps out of a barricaded house attempting to break through enemy lines, only to have both legs blown off by an IED (Improvised Explosive Device) planted at the doorway. Trails of bright red blood streak across the floor as his Navy SEAL teemmates drag him back inside. He lets out a scream of unbearable deafening agony when they start treating his wounds. Beside him lies Leading Petty Officer Sam who is also critically wounded, with other fellow soldiers frozen in place around them. The piercing scream cuts through the room, interrupted only by the muffled ringing in their ears or, at times, the complete muting of their internal voices—these men seem to experience temporary deafness in the wake of the explosion and the sheer intensity of the pain.

Meanwhile, their Iraqi interpreter lies by the front door, blown into dozens of dismembered pieces. Across the street, angry gunfire erupts, all aimed at the Americans.

The M2 Bradley fighting vehicle sent for extraction is forced to retreat. One panicked, inexperienced soldier unthinkingly jabs a morphine syringe straight into his own palm. And worse still, it becomes clear that not just the SEAL team, but the entire U.S. force involved in the joint operation has walked into a well-planned ambush in this Battle of Ramadi in 2006. Aside from occasional calls for low-flying airstrikes as a deterrent, and the uncertain promise of reinforcements struggling to approach from nearby alleys, Team Alpha One, now trapped inside a freestanding house, has no way out.

The film Warfare opens with a static shot of an old-school acrobatics show on television, with leotards and leg warmers straight out of The Substance. Young Navy SEALs crowd around the screen in their barracks, eyes locked, silent yet almost feverishly excited, as if collectively hypnotized. The film then cuts to a small unit tasked with monitoring the local marketplace through a mix of fixed objective shots and body-mounted POVs, immersing viewers into the bombed-out, war-scarred streets of Ramadi.

They creep forward as carefully as they can, but the alleyway to the civilian house they are taking is quiet. Viewers aren't holding their breath, as they know danger will come sooner or later. There are even moments when the soldiers joke around: at a street corner, one mimics a move from the acrobatics show, trying to reduce the nerves or show off his calmness and courage to his teammates.

In short, before the firefight erupts, Warfare presents a long stretch of material far removed from typical war genre fare. It's filled with mundane routines rather than cinematic tension, such as idle gestures to relieve boredom, and the dragged-out monotony of detaining apartment residents. Even when combat begins, the audience doesn’t get the usual choreography of action: no agile silhouettes, slick magazine swaps, or heroes dodging bullets with improbable grace. Instead, we get hesitant steps, clumsy climbs, bloated bodies,and panicked, fumbling movements.

I can’t help but admire how Warfare strips away heroism—and even action itself—from its portrayal of war. It feels so real that you begin to experience a physical sense of pain just watching it. But then, I quickly catch myself: I’ve never been on a battlefield. I’m not a military buff obsessed with weapons and tactics. How can I judge whether what Warfare depicts is “real” or not?

I think back to my rare experiences hiking in full gear. There's no way I could scale rocky walls using both hands and feet, nor dash through dense woods dodging branches. And yet, on military news channels, we often see special forces operatives breezing through obstacle courses, reaching targets with flawless precision. Surely the Navy SEALs stationed in Iraq are closer to those elite performers than they are to clumsy me.

So what, then, are we to make of the unlucky Alpha One team shown in Warfare? Could their staggering incompetence be exaggerated—perhaps even deliberately farcical—to better highlight the heroism of the Alpha Two members who come to rescue them?

But this film is rooted in real-life events. The story is told by Ray Mendoza, the communications officer who coordinated air support for Alpha One during the actual operation. In the closing credits, the film pays tribute to Elliott Miller—the sniper with the most gut-wrenching scream—who lost both his legs and his ability to speak in that very battle. So perhaps, in some sense, what we see is not objective reality, but Ray’s memory of it—a memory grounded in personal truth. After all, as the man in the sky with the clearest view, he may be the one best positioned to tell the story.

Regardless of how “real” it is, Warfare evokes a visceral, bodily pain in its viewers. The soldiers lying in pools of blood, their eyes filled with despair, and their screams of agony, all brought to mind a recent press conference in Kyiv. The speakers were Russian mercenaries who had been captured on the battlefield. Among them were three young men from China. One said he took the job because he couldn’t find work back home. Another said he was bored with peace and wanted some excitement. They all claimed it was far easier to enlist with the Russian army than the Ukrainian side. But once on the battlefield, they immediately regretted everything. They quickly realized that war is nothing like PUBG—you don’t get to hit restart when you die. And then there is another young Chinese guy, who simply based on a sincere opposition to this war of aggression, chose to join the Ukrainian side and ultimately died fighting on foreign soil. No one knows what kind of fear filled that young guy’s eyes in his final moments.

In Kunming, China, I once met an American veteran named Mike who had served in the Vietnam War. One year, while walking the streets of Kunming, he happened to bump into a fellow Kansan, a young active-duty soldier. Not long after, that soldier was deployed to northern Iraq to help train Kurdish forces. He got in touch with Mike and asked if he’d be willing to come to Mosul to shoot a war film, fully funded by the Kurdish military.

And that’s how old Mike, who had no filmmaking experience and not even much of an interest in movies, ended up directing a big war film with real guns and real bullets. He called me to a bar one night to show me the unfinished cut. It was a chaotic mix: a kung-fu spy war flick where everything aside from the weapons and soldiers felt totally fake, even laughable.

Old Mike knew his film was no good, but it did capture an absurd kind of truth.

So what about Warfare? Does it also express the filmmaker’s view of war beyond its raw and painful sense of realism? At the end of the film, we’re told it’s dedicated to Elliott Miller, the soldier who lost his legs and his ability to speak during the battle. But just before that final credit, we see the Iraqi militants, having overrun the American position, arrive at a house and stare blankly at the bloodied remains of their fellow countryman, the translator, whose body was blown apart by IED. The woman who earlier had screamed “Why” at the American soldiers who invaded her home now stands silently, emotionless, amid the ruins.

Perhaps Warfare also offers a quiet, unspoken apology to the locals whose lives were destroyed in the process despite fully depicting the agony of its own side’s suffering.

Would anyone having watched this film still be tempted to go fight in Russia or Ukraine as a mercenary?