Peeking with serious intent to probe

Starting my trip up Empire's top 20 films of 2025

#20 :  Warfare

After imagining a brutal US conflict in last year’s Civil War, Alex Garland continues in military mode – this time seeking the truth, or as close to the truth as subjective recollection can provide. Warfare is an exercise in memory-as-movie, aiming to recreate a real-life battle fought by Ray Mendoza (who co-directs with Garland, portrayed in the drama by D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai) and his platoon in the Iraq War. There’s a stripping back of narrative beats and movie-movie theatrics, then, in favour of hard, bloody, painful reality – every moment drawn from the memories of the real events that Mendoza and his men experienced. With a stellar ensemble – Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, Kit Connor, Michael Gandolfini and Joseph Quinn among them – and deeply immersive filmmaking, Garland and Mendoza deliver an unforgettable 95 minutes that’s hard to shake.

I imagine Alex Garland (only our second visit with the lad, after the somewhat underwhelming Civil War) will do an impressive realistic war film, which I suspect will be a period of intense boredom followed by a period of intense chaos. What I'm struggling with is whether it's going be anything other than unremittingly grim - to my credit, I'm already aware that war isn't fun and I'm not expected to learn anything else.

Hmmm - I'm both wrong and right. I'm wrong in that it's not boredom then chaos because it's boredom, then chaos, then intensely paranoid inactivity, then a whole load more chaos - and it's all surprisingly suspenseful. However, I'm right in that war is, indeed, pretty grim - assuming this is representative and it certainly feels like every effort has gone into making it so. In terms of story, let's just say you're not going to be surprised by events.

It's obviously very well filmed (which I completely expected) and it has interesting use of sound (or the lack of it) to represent the memories that the soldiers have or are missing (although tbh, constant screaming would get somewhat tiring) - it's certainly a film which has been well planned. There is an argument that the baddies are a bit faceless - there is at least a token effort to make not all the foreigners the bad guys, but I feel it possibly passed most of the film's audience by. 

And it's well acted by some reasonably well known actors including D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (who we've previously met in Reservation Dogs and I think we'll be seeing more of him), Will Poulter (who we've actually only met once previously, and you get ten points if you guess it was here), Cosmo Jarvis (excellent in Shogun), Kit Connor (best known for Heartstopper, which I skipped over), Taylor John Smith (who's in Sharp Objects, which is certainly one of the better things I've been made to watch on here) and Joseph Quinn (who's been in quite a few things, but is soon going to be very well known for playing George Harrison in Sam Mendes's Beatles quartet - which I have to admit I'm intrigued by). None of the roles are flashy, but since they're all playing real people they're probably trying their best to be respectful - and I certainly don't get the impression that anyone would be disappointed in their portrayal.

Overall, it's a worthy effort and a well done film but I don't feel it really needed to be made - I guess it's great (maybe not the best word?) for those who went through the actual events to have their story told, but there must be a million other stories that films could tell, but don't. However, I agree with The Guardian that it was immersive because it was a load more engaging than I expected to be because it was all pretty tense and the film is only 95 minutes long - the more films I watch, the more I think 80-110 minutes is the perfect running time. If you like your films with people shooting people (and nearly always missing - which I can believe is absolutely the norm) then I feel you'll like this, but I also struggle to imagine you (or tbh anyone else) are going to be surprised by events. 

And if you can't be bothered to follow the link, we saw Will Poulter in The Bear - and he's very good in it. But obviously he's best known in our house for very randomly appearing in Arsenal programmes advertising team shirts - my daughter is always "is that really that guy?"