I only go to movies a couple of times a year because the dreck produced by major studios is simply not worth the cost. Last night was one of those nights. My wife hustled me out of the house to one of those cinema-drafthouses to see an indie film called "Warfare." I encountered a short clip of the movie on X, and it blew me away. Not from the violence but from the emotions it dredged up of being with men getting amped up and psyched to go outside the wire on a mission or strap on a parachute harness. [Full disclosure: I'm not a combat vet, and I've only been pinned down by rifle fire twice.]

Watch the first five minutes of what seems to be a Russian cut from the movie. If you're still with me after this, then read on.

I find most war movies a bit trite and overly sentimental. Sometimes, war has a higher purpose than mere coercion, but I'd consider those occasions rare. Whenever you come away from a war movie feeling uplifted, I'd submit that you have been sold a product. To me, the story is the bonding of men facing death, the shared suffering and sacrifice endured when we ask men barely (and maybe not) out of their teens to take incredible risks and responsibility. I've always held "Black Hawk Down" to be the gold standard because it hit the sociology of an infantry unit pitch-perfect and hammers home the fact that young men take these risks and pay this price, now and in the future, for each other, not to make the world safe for democracy or any other slogan the political class uses to sanitize what is at once both the most brutal and transcendent of human activities. Former Navy SEAL and one of the main characters in this film, Ray Mendoza, and English screenwriter and director Alex Garland team up to turn Mendoza's autobiographical script into a masterpiece of what wars do to the young men we send to fight them.

As the video opens, a SEAL platoon sets out to occupy an observation post. The plan is to take over a two-story residence and gather intelligence to support a larger operation. Almost immediately, small things go wrong. They discover that the second-floor apartment has a cinderblock wall preventing entry from the stairwell, which they batter down. The platoon has two Iraqi soldiers attached as translators, and it is definitely not a Lone Ranger-Tonto relationship. The Iraqis are well aware that they are the odd men out in the platoon. The SEALs take two families living in the building hostage, for lack of a better word. Overall, I think they treat the dynamic between the SEALs and their involuntary hosts pretty well. Some reviewers have complained that the Iraqi insurgents are ignored. They are right. The insurgents just are. They are like the bugs and the heat. If anyone has any feelings about them, they don't mention it in the film. I don't find that remarkable.

The feeling of impending doom begins to creep in as their sniper, English actor Cosmo Jarvis, who plays real-life SEAL sniper Elliott Miller, begins noting a build-up of military-age men. Things quickly go pear-shaped as their position comes under fire, SEALs are killed and wounded, and their focus is on evacuating their wounded and getting to safety; any larger mission becomes irrelevant.

High Points

The equipment, tactics, movement, and all the technical details are impeccable. It is textbook.

Other than the one song, there is no soundtrack. That isn't to say that it isn't some of the best sound work ever in a movie. Absolute, pin-drop silence builds tension. The mix of gunfire, shouted commands, radio chatter, etc., creates a sensory overload tension that is so true-to-life. The movie also uses sound to make the viewer understand what very loud noises do to your hearing. There is silence, that becomes that buzzing, man-talking-inside-a-barrel effect...well IYKYK. As a young lieutenant, I had an eardrum blown out, complete with blood running down my neck, and that event immediately flashed into my mind thanks to the sound. The sound changes depending on what the central character's hearing is like. Sometimes, there is silence as a character mouths words. There are deep concussive sounds that you can feel inside your chest, and the ballistic crack of bullets whipping by your head was just too real.

Ray Mendoza, who wrote the script and is played by D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, does a great job in building character arcs for people we only know by sight, not name. Some do well under stress, and some give the impression they have been crushed. He also adds details that tell their own story. Michael Gandolfini's character, the USMC forward air controller with the SEALs, attempts to use a morphine autoinjector on a wounded man and injects the morphine into his own thumb. When Mendoza notifies higher headquarters that the platoon has two seriously wounded, Joseph Quinn's character, Sam, who had both legs mangled, incongruously demands to know if he's one of the seriously wounded. You see a clear change in the leadership dynamic when Will Poulter as Erik, the platoon leader, hands over the reins to Charles Melton, his second-in-command. You may not like him, but he makes stuff happen...even to the extent of having Mendoza use the callsign of a colonel to get Bradley Infantry Fighting Vehicles sent to pick them up.

We also see how the Iraqi insurgents used our rules of engagement against us. They know they can't be shot unless they are carrying weapons, so they don't. They brazenly walk, unarmed, through the marketplace to their assembly area before attacking. Aircraft are reduced to being a "show of force" because of the likelihood of civilian casualties. 

This is not a war movie; it is a movie about men at war. If you think anything militarily significant happened here, the ending will disabuse you of that notion. The short documentary segment after the fade-to-black for the movie really ties everything together.

"Warfare" is minimalist, but the emotions it conjures up are raw, and you feel them as much as you watch them. Go see it. It is a great film, and we need to support smaller indie studios, such as Angel Studios, if we want to change what movies look like.

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