Making a war film “apolitical” is impossible

Imagine: You’re in your early twenties, and your heart has been captured by the soulful eyes of one of today’s up-and-coming heartthrobs. This person has had a couple of big roles but no huge mainstream breakthrough yet, and that fact has made your imaginary kinship even stronger. You want to go support their latest venture because they’re in it, and you enjoy both their acting and the chance to look at them for 90 minutes up on the big screen. The movie you’re forking over $20 for (or more, depending on the location and what snacks you purchase) is a war movie, being touted as “the most realistic war movie ever made.” You don’t really care about that kind of thing. But because the movie stars one of your favorite actors, and because it’s distributed by one of the hottest, trendiest distribution companies, you choose to see it anyway. And maybe, just maybe, a behind-the-scenes image with your favorite actor looking like the picture of masculinity, mugging for the camera while holding a machine gun, played a rousing role in getting you to the theater, too. 

As it turns out, you’ve been the target of a bait-and-switch. You come out of the theater realizing that your hunky idol had negligible screen time — at least you think so. Really, you couldn’t tell who was who for 78% of the movie. Whether or not you took anything from the film doesn’t matter. You’ve spent the cash to boost this movie’s opening weekend box office, helping to create a new ripple in its larger story. Hundreds of thousands of others will do the same, and the question of what they’ll take away from their experience could have an entirely different answer.

“Warfare,” the new film by Alex Garland, co-directed by Iraq war veteran Ray Mendoza, welcomes and refutes that ambiguity. When A24 released the first trailer for the film — which follows a single, horrific day in the lives of a platoon of Navy SEALs stationed in Ramadi in 2006 — the response was not exactly glowing. A brief scroll through the replies to the trailer on X will show people calling the movie “American war propaganda” and decrying the persistence of war movies in an age when nationalist military narratives have less sway over dwindling enlistment figures than ever.

In response, Garland and Mendoza have stressed the apoliticism of their film in virtually all of the press they’ve done in the run-up to its release. “It’s an exercise in trying to recreate a sequence of events as accurately as possible,” Garland told CNN. He expanded in an interview with Empire magazine, saying, “[The film] is not attempting to telegraph a message. It’s attempting to telegraph information, and it’s telegraphing the information in as honest a way as it can.” While realism is one of the movie’s strong suits, authenticity does not exempt “Warfare” from politicization. When an artist makes a movie, when they roll footage and commit something to film or digital imagery, it is an inherently political action. Realism doesn’t negate that truth, and the fact that Garland and Mendoza have side-stepped any firm commentary on the film’s messaging allows viewers to project their own feelings onto it. Regardless of whether or not it wants to be, “Warfare” is not an apolitical film.

“Warfare” does, however, take great care to remind viewers of what it’s trying to be. The film skirts overt propaganda as often as it can, focusing instead on the bond the platoon shares, both in and out of combat. The film opens with the men banded together, watching the gyrating video for the 2006 Eric Prydz dance hit “Call On Me.” (Hearing this classic in IMAX sound is, admittedly, irresistible.) This ensemble cast includes “Stranger Things” breakout (and future Beatle) Joseph Quinn, “Heartstopper” actor Kit Connor, “Shōgun” star Cosmo Jarvis and a wealth of other names like Noah Centineo, Charles Melton and Michael Gandolfini. The film’s marketing has relied heavily on the real-life relationships forged while filming. This week, the actors showed off their matching tattoos that read, “Call On Me.”

Michael Gandolfini in “Warfare” (Murray Close/A24). But before the action even begins — and before the movie was even released — “Warfare” has already failed its messageless mission. Even in this cinematic simulation, the brotherhood molded by combat is made to look appealing. These men are all having a great time together, blowing off some steam before their next day’s mission. This intensity looks downright appealing to a viewer who craves this bond. This scene may be a memory recreated for the big screen, and its inclusion in the film is ostensibly to give the viewer a sense of their war-torn fraternity. Already, a coded message is being sent, one that Mendoza and Garland will return to in the film’s frustrating final moments.

First, there is war to attend to. Under the cover of night, the platoon walks the streets of Ramadi and chooses a location for their sniper mission. “I like this one, let’s take it,” one of them says before they invade the house and hold an Iraqi family hostage in their home. This family, along with two Iraqi soldiers who function as translators for the American group, are seen only occasionally throughout the remainder of the film. They function as a unit on which viewers can hang their sympathies. Or, perhaps to a more vengeful, xenophobic American viewer, people who got what they deserved. 

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The next 85-odd minutes are dull, exciting, and dull again. In the hallowed name of realism, Mendoza and Garland include all of the moments of nothing that lead up to a full-on attack from the American enemy. The men are pacing around the home they’ve stormed, waiting for movement. Garland and Mendoza avoid supplying any character backstories but give us just enough of an idea of their personalities so that we can sympathize with them when a grenade is thrown through their sniper window, and their entire operation goes to sh*t. 

But because the audience doesn’t know any of these people or what motivated them to become Navy SEALs, conjuring a genuine emotional attachment to what they endure afterward is all the more difficult. By striving for realism, Garland and Mendoza have relinquished any semblance of cinematic storytelling, leaving the viewer at arm’s distance from what’s happening onscreen. It’s a point for their claims that the film is an exercise in realistic recreation but a loss in making a successful moviegoing experience. Despite the movie’s excellent, unnerving, bone-shaking sound design and skillful camerawork, it’s rather exhausting to watch.

Kit Connor in “Warfare” (Murray Close/A24)It’s interesting, then, that this film closely follows Garland’s 2024 drama “Civil War,” which similarly divided audiences but was a far more invigorating and interesting time at the movies. “Civil War” follows a crew of journalists in a near-future dystopia, journeying to the White House to capture the final stages of an insurrection already underway in a country divided. Garland’s screenplay refused to supply concrete details. It was never explained which side was “good” or “bad,” or even what they stood for.

Upon its release, some viewers were exasperated by the film’s purposefully opaque political commentary. I, on the other hand, thought Garland’s reluctance to explain things was a bold and better choice. He allowed “Civil War” to be about the significance of photojournalism and the courage of those who are willing to go into combat to document history without losing the plot by trying to elaborate on specific themes. Garland crafted a dystopia in which to relay that importance, one that looked so familiar that viewers could easily apply it to situations they may be less acquainted with, like the horrific images that have been pouring out of Gaza for the last two years and beyond. The sequences of brutal violence in “Civil War” make the actual politics within the film’s universe pointless. Inhumanity removes the need for a broader explanation. The wreckage left over — and the stark, nauseating images of it — have far more meaning than whatever beliefs any one side uses to justify this violence. 

Mendoza was a war consultant on “Civil War,” and it’s clear that Garland was moved enough by his expertise that he believed “Warfare” could be a pseudo-companion film that extended the former movie’s messages. Except “Warfare” has no messages, remember? Or at least that’s what its writer-directors have told the press. Yes, by even releasing these films so close together, “Warfare” can be seen as the continuation of Garland’s narrative, or at least an attempted one. Except, in “Civil War,” Garland created a picture of journalistic objectivity living within a world rife with recognizable, real-life symbols that he’d scrubbed of their meaning. That’s not possible in a movie like “Warfare,” which has significant historical context and plenty of cinematic depictions of it for the audience to recall during their viewing experience. There will always be a larger political significance to a war movie like this, especially if you’re striving for realism. Because, regardless of the motives of these real-life SEALs, the war this film depicts is inherently political, and there’s no way to make a movie about it without the film itself becoming political too. 

All that isn’t even to mention the cast, who have been photographed for promotional images looking like a facsimile of 2006-era masculinity. That’s a disconcerting reality for 2025, a year when traditional modes of masculinity are being resurrected, disseminated and praised while something like tradwife propaganda is overtaking social media algorithms. Perhaps it’s alarmist to conflate the masculinity on display in “Warfare” and its promotional campaign with the rise in tradwife content. You could argue that tradwives are simply a niche interest; these women might not actually be quitting their jobs to become tradwives. But the videos of them acting like 1950s housewives, making them oodles of cash from curious viewers, function as a form of propaganda. They make reducing a woman’s role in the world seem feasible, even fun and relaxing, and successful propaganda often functions like entertainment. While “Warfare” certainly doesn’t make combat look like anything more than gruesome violence, its last few minutes undercut the anti-war messaging and Garland and Mendoza’s apolitical stance.

Will Poulter in “Warfare” (Murray Close/A24)By the end of this deadly mission, the platoon has lost a few men, and the rest have escaped to safety in armored vehicles. The Iraqi family being held hostage gets up and walks through the wreckage of their home. The inclusion of this scene plays to viewers’ sympathies. Each member of this innocent family has had their lives forever changed in a flash. And just as fast, they are left alone to pick up the pieces; no resources, no aid, nothing. That is an image that viewers can infer meaning from, and Garland and Mendoza are essentially asking them to form a conclusion by putting it in the film. Like the photos taken of the violent dystopia in “Civil War,” this final sequence in “Warfare” firmly states that the loud extremities of war are one part of history. What happens to those affected by war — and how their images influence a narrative — is the story that continues long after the battles are over. 

The directors’ statements that the film is not political and has no messaging other than realism are further muddled by the final two frames. Here comes the sequence of side-by-side photos, comparing the actors to their real-life counterparts. The majority of the real-life photos are blurred, presumably for lack of release waiver or safety. Then, we see a photo somehow attained of the actual family whose home was invaded, also with their faces blurred. They, like the SEALs, are victims of American nationalism, being paid their respects by the filmmakers. It’s an interesting inclusion until one other photo follows it: A photo of the cast alongside some of the actual veterans, one of whom has his middle finger raised proudly to the camera. 

We, as the audience, have no way of knowing why this gesture was made, only that it’s placed immediately after the photo of the Iraqi family. It feels somewhat unsettling seeing the two so close together. Hey, maybe whoever took the picture made a harmless jab that got a bird flipped in response. We don’t know for sure, but we can certainly feel strange about it, especially in a movie that tries so hard to leave politics out of the equation. Interesting how just seeing an image of something can conjure a wealth of potentially political messages in a viewer’s head. Maybe Garland and Mendoza should’ve considered that just because something is real doesn’t mean it’s insignificant.