Warfare: Dancing in the Dark

What's the best way to portray war in cinema? Best way for our eyes, our conscience or what exactly?, I wonder after experiencing war horror once again. So, I propose another question then, but this one is for you. Here I go again: Why do you watch war movies? To raise awareness, be horrified or combine these two feelings? I could have asked this to myself, but I haven't found an answer yet, and I honestly don't know if there is one.

Let's imagine an urban street as the symbolic representation of a movie. The story would unfold in that street, inside cars, motorcycles or any other automobile. In parallel, we, the audience, would walk down the street with a—constantly synchronize—low, medium or high risk of some car crashing with another and ending up on the sidewalk with us, destroying or causing us a guaranteed agony. To put it in a more real setting, this would be the equivalent to when we feel surprised or shocked by something a movie has just presented to us.

On the other side of this spontaneous symbology I'm presenting, there would be the possibility of a viewer calmly walking on the sidewalk and deciding on his own to cross the street, being completely aware of the risk this entails. Even though there are traffic lights or caution gestures—which in reality would basically be the warning signs that tell us that a movie might destroy us—we know not everyone obeys the rules. Ultimately, many times, human beings are creatures with an errant, unpredictable nature.

This was how, approximately and leaving differences aside, I chose to live the new immersive experience of notable British director Alex Garland, who, after starting as a screenwriter, decided to devote himself to pointing his index finger in film sets full-time in order to do the whole job a little over ten years ago. In the middle, he tried existentialist sci-fi, the hardest sci-fi, psychological folk and documented dystopia. But the interesting part is that, in all these subgenres, despite having their own codes, he never escaped horror. The horror of knowing that soon humans may not be able to distinguish between one another, of not recognizing our own loved ones, of knowing that demons exist and follow us everywhere… and of finding ourselves agonizing in our own homeland, with the constant threat of our peers.

If in his quasi-dystopian war road movie Civil War, the director put some photojournalists in the scene's heart as the catalyst core of the narration, embellishing it with helicopters firing missiles across Washington's skies and a grandiloquent mise-en-scène in the best Apocalypses Now style, in the film we will analyze next, the complete opposite happens. There are no explanations, no clear factions, no room for reflection… let alone for weakness. But despite the two perspectives on different sides of the same line, it's interesting to highlight the correlation that links them. Garland's North American paradox that premiered last year could be interpreted as the result of the military policies proposed during George W. Bush's administration, in which this self-biopic is based on.

Co-directed with Ray Mendoza, former Navy Seal, Warfare's story emerges from—and urges for— several needs: the first one could be Mendoza's, in an effort to relate to what happened to him, but seen from another angle. The second stems from the weakening of the war genre, which even though it had its esthetically risky projects, like 1917 or Napoleon, needed a new twist. And what better than to tell it from a survivor's perspective?

I could find some more reasons, but I don't think that's the point.

Warfare places us in a pretty specific—too specific I would say—time and place. November 19, 2006, in a street of Ramadi, Iraq. A squad of American marines in charge of controlling the movements of several suspects enjoys a pretty bawdy music video on TV. It's Swedish DJ Eric Prydz' successful "Call on Me," one of the many hits that were heard at the clubs everywhere. It's extremely important to understand these first words I'm expressing as an introduction since they are useful to imagine what this journey's destination will be. And what will come later…

Garland presents an initial approach in which there are no protagonists as such, beyond this squad's ranks. There are no distinctive features of each one. There's no moral blurring. Ethics are unclear. As if it was a documentary without a narrator nor interviews, the movie benefits from the resource of one place to show us a sense of fellowship, companionship and solidarity that spreads equally across everyone. There are no differences, no competitions. The important thing is the mission, and the rest is debated in the homeland. But what's the mission exactly? Dismantle any suspicious activity that puts the squad's survival at risk.

Not much can be said of the movie's first half apart from the fact that it manages to sustain certain tension, something similar to what Gus Van Sant did in Elephant, also based on a war but on a much smaller scale: the socio-ideological one. I could appreciate these two works as two sides of the same coin, but once again… that's not the point. What's the best thing a director can do when he's aware his audience knows where his story is headed? Elegantly ramble. Garland cautiously immerses us in how much—or little, the quantities aren't exact—there's left of humanity in these soldiers, to then cool our souls thanks to an encompassing sound design that transforms into another protagonist after the disaster.

At the end, some Iraqis go out to the streets to violently claim what in essence is theirs. A lot of blown-up cement in broad daylight. A part of an arm lays over there, creating an unpleasant, disturbed memory in some survivor's mind. The explosion's darkness loses strength, the sun makes its way among the dust. And up until a couple of hours ago, there they were, dancing in that same darkness, happy, full of life. Crazy, right? I look around and once again wonder: What's the point of war?

Published on JUNE 4, 2025, 00:51 PM | UTC-GMT -3

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