The director Alex Garland's 2024 film, Civil War, was gritty, realistic, and often horrifying to watch, but it was fundamentally a flight of fantasy. One could debate just how fanciful its near-future depiction of America going to war with itself over a president who refused to leave office was, but for all that movie's intense effort to depict combat realistically, Garland was only imagining the reasons for it. The premise of his follow-up, Warfare, feels like a challenge the filmmaker issued to himself: What if you stripped away all the hooky plotting typical of military dramas, and just put an unembellished skirmish from a real war on-screen' Would it still work as cinema' The answer is yes'but Warfare is without a doubt a tougher pill to swallow than its predecessor. Garland wrote and directed the movie in collaboration with Ray Mendoza, a former U.S. Navy SEAL. Mendoza served as the military adviser on Civil War and helped Garland design some of its most ambitious action...
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