"Warfare": two-paragraph review

[WARNING: spoilers.]

With a meager run time of only 95 minutes, 2025's "Warfare" is just a wee morsel of a movie. Starring D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis (probably better known from his role as Blackthorne in the recent drama series "Shōgun"), Kit Connor, Finn Bennett, Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton, Noah Centineo, and Michael Gandolfini, the movie was written and directed by Alex Garland ("Dredd") and Ray Mendoza, the real-life SEAL JTAC communications officer who coordinated air support for the operation that this story was about. "Warfare" is based on the memories of the troops who were there just after the 2006 battle of Ramadi, Iraq; as with "Platoon," the focus is on the American troops, with enemy combatants generally either unseen or at a distance. Much of the movie is a buildup of tension as enemy forces slowly and methodically array themselves in preparation for an attack on a platoon of Navy SEAL snipers, Alpha One, who had been providing cover for a Marine operation. Most of the movie's blood and gore come from explosive devices, including one big, startling IED that detonates as the SEALs are trying to leave their position, forcing them to retreat back into the house they had commandeered and to request a second attempt at extraction (the vehicle from the first attempt was crippled). Another platoon, Alpha Two, arrives to support Alpha One, and by the end of the film, both platoons, along with their injured, are successfully extracted. As silence descends on the city, residents and insurgents cautiously appear on the streets.

"Warfare" was there and gone too fast to make a huge impression. It was tense, especially at the beginning, but once the action got going, and once the gunfire seemed to suggest that people were shooting at each other to no effect—no random headshots through windows or anything like that—the tension level dropped precipitously. Almost all of the damage to life and limb was caused by explosives. I also recognized quite a few of the actors in this ensemble cast, and once again, there were a lot of non-Americans (especially Brits) in American roles: only three of the cast members mentioned above were American. I again had to wonder whether America simply lacked the talent and the numbers to fill out the cast. If so, I'd say we're in trouble as a nation. The story of "Warfare" was meant to provide a sense of combat from the soldier's perspective: the waiting, the tense buildup, the actual fight, the accompanying confusion, and the conclusion without any sense of purpose or closure. The movie presented all of this without judging the matter one way or another, but the plot was so unpretentious that the story lacked the gut-wrenching impact of movies like "Platoon" or "Saving Private Ryan." I also felt a bit sorry for the two actors who played injured members of the platoon: they both got to scream and moan a lot, and the constancy of their noise-making often had me thinking that it'd be nice to find a way to shut them up, which unworthy thought immediately produced a sense of guilt, coupled with the impression that, since the insurgents' attack happened during the daytime amid so much smoke and noise, the men's cries did nothing to reveal the platoons' positions and so was inconsequential. In all, I came away from "Warfare" thinking it was a satisfactory film, but not much more.