Following A24’s intense box-office hit Civil War (and Ex Machina and Devs), director Alex Garland signaled to The Guardian that he was taking a few steps back from directing to focus on screenwriting. Of course Garland’s words were misinterpreted and “extrapolated,” as he told IndieWire, and the fruits of his sharpened pen will soon be seen in Danny Boyle’s 28 Years Later. Garland is still dipping his toes into the director’s pool, too, at least while co-directing another A24 movie with Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza.
The pair also co-wrote the movie together, and it will be (unsurprisingly, given the subject matter) an intense project to behold. Let’s talk about what we can expect from Warfare.
Plot
Civil War took a boots-on-the-ground approach through a war-journalist lens, but Warfare gazes straight through the eyes (and sniper-rifle scopes) of embedded Navy SEALS. As a whole, the project is “a roughly 90-minute real-time recreation” of a battle faced by Mendoza during his time in Iraq, as he and Garland detailed to Entertainment Weekly. And originally, the movie was conceived by Mendoza as a way to visualize that day’s horrors for a comrade (who he names only as “Elliot”) who retains no memories of the extraction:
“He’s had some [traumatic brain injury] issues and extremely bad damage to his extremities. He’s in a wheelchair and he doesn’t recall what happened. We’ve tried to write it out for him in literary form, but even that’s really confusing. I think he understood what happened, but for us who were there and remember it, we have visual memories of it. He’s lacking that, and I’ve always wanted to do that for him. I felt it would be easier for him to watch something than to read 12 individuals’ differing perspectives on it.”
As Garland further told EW, a Civil War real-time scene had prompted him to quiz Ray on “if he had a story or true-life event that he would be interested in telling in real-time.” That answer was yes: “We started talking about this film, which is something that Ray, unbeknownst to me, had been wanting to make for a long, long time. My role then was just to facilitate Ray telling this story that he already wanted to tell.” From the A24 synopsis:
Written and Directed by Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland (Civil War, 28 Days Later), Warfare embeds audiences with a platoon of American Navy SEALs in the home of an Iraqi family, overwatching the movement of US forces through insurgent territory. A visceral, boots-on-the-ground story of modern warfare, told like never before: in real time and based on the memory of the people who lived it.
Cast
Mendoza and Garland gathered a Who’s Who-style cast that puts current Shōgun star and former Peaky Blinders actor Cosmo Jarvis (who portrayed fictional WWI vet Barney Thompson) back into sniper action.
The ensemble cast further includes D’pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (Reservation Dogs), who revealed to Collider that he and his co-stars got tattoos to commemorate their bond after the three-month shoot. That group would be Will Poulter (The Bear), Finn Bennett (True Detective: Night Country), Noah Centineo (The Recruit), Charles Melton (May December) Kit Connor (Heartstopper), Michael Gandolfini (The Many Saints Of Newark), Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things), Taylor John Smith (Where The Crawdads Sing), Adain Bradley (Tarot), and Henrique Zaga (Beyond The Universe).
Trailer
Welcome to this platoon’s hell in the below trailer.
A featurette fills in more brotherhood blanks.
Release Date
Warfare arrives in theaters on April 11, 2025. The below poster keeps the grim tone alive.
Content shared from uproxx.com.