Warfare isn’t your typical war film. There’s no storyline. No arc. No triumphant mission. No clean resolution. What you get instead is a memory—fragmented, raw, and intimate.
Directed by Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland, and rooted in Mendoza’s real-life experience as a Navy SEAL, Warfare drops us into a single mission in Ramadi, Iraq in 2006. It’s told in real time, not through a traditional narrative, but through the collective recollections of the SEALs who lived it. There’s no score to guide your emotions—just breath, sweat, silence, screams, and gunfire. It doesn’t ask you to watch. It makes you feel.
The ensemble cast includes D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Finn Bennett, Taylor John Smith, Michael Gandolfini, Adain Bradley, Noah Centineo, Evan Holtzman, Henry Zaga, Joseph Quinn, and Charles Melton. But the film especially stands out as a tribute to real-life Navy SEAL Elliott, portrayed by Cosmo Jarvis as Elliot Miller, the platoon’s medic and lead sniper—who has no memory of what happened that day, only Warfare’s retelling. And that’s what makes the film so special. It’s not for us. It’s for him. That’s why there’s no glamor. No embellishment. Just truth.
It’s not about one hero. It’s about the shared trauma of everyone involved. Young men—some too young to legally drink—navigating impossible decisions, fleeting moments of levity, and the weight of survival. There’s no dramatization, no glossy packaging. Just lived experience.
What Warfare does exceptionally well is capture the percussion of war. The stillness of a marksman before a shot. The muffled aftermath of a blast. The sweat that builds as tension tightens. Even the silences are loud. The audio is some of the most immersive I’ve ever experienced. This is a film you need to see in theaters, with surround sound. You won’t just hear the chaos—you’ll feel it.
Beyond the battle, Warfare quietly critiques what happens after. We spend billions on war but leave our veterans to navigate inadequate healthcare, housing, and mental health support. The film doesn’t preach. But it prompts reflection—and that might be more powerful.
Ray Mendoza puts his experience on full display, and you can feel the weight of that responsibility in every frame. It’s not just catharsis for him—it’s a mirror held up for those who’ve been through it and those who never will.
Warfare doesn’t glorify. It doesn’t simplify. It just tells the truth—unflinchingly, and without filter. It made me realize that in war, everyone loses something. And for those who’ve lived it, this might be one of the rare portrayals that gets it right.
It’s not an easy watch. But maybe that’s exactly why it matters.