Alex Garland's Iraq-war film Warfare is visceral, exciting and unethical

There are multiple MAMs on the roof. Your CO is screaming in your ear to collapse to the first deck, while JTAC is screaming for CASEVAC. Two bravos wait outside, surrounded by IED phosphorus. A frogman kneels beside you, while another frantically asks if you've broken down yet — equipment's good to go. Someone pops smoke. The show of force is three mikes out. The first frogman is smiling. 

"BTF up, bro!" 

Confused yet? Don't worry, I am, too. I was frantically scribbling notes throughout director Alex Garland's most recent apolitical politics movie Warfare, and I'm still not sure I got all the terms right. For all I know, I may have just sworn at you.

But explanation and context are not desirable qualities to Garland. In fact, at a recent Toronto Q&A, when somebody asks what value his film has for audiences, he basically says they're taboo.

"One of the functions of this film is to hear from a veteran as accurate as possible," he says of Warfare, which painstakingly recreates, in real time, a specific catastrophe ex-Navy SEAL and co-director Ray Mendoza went through in 2006 in Iraq.

"Taking away cinematic devices like music … in order to get something maybe more reliable." 

It's an interesting — if entirely artificial — constraint he's laid at his own feet: everything that you see in Warfare really happened. But more than that, everything that happened, Garland would have you believe, is in Warfare. 

"There was no decision to be made about whether something was valuable for the story or how helpful it would be for audiences," he said. "There's no backstory, because these guys don't talk about their backstory … There's nothing to explain their jargon — there's nothing to help anyone." 

But as a result, what ends up making it to the screen is a slick, almost nauseating confusion.

The boundaries Garland draws for himself are probably most evident in how we connect — or rather, fail to connect — with the characters. Though we are sold on famous faces — Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn and Canada's D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai round out the impressive cast list — we are hardly able to hold on to their names, let alone learn what makes them keep fighting as faceless Iraqi forces pepper them with small-arms fire. 

So why did Garland make a movie devoid of character growth, political examination or commentary? To explain, he tells a story about the time he was backpacking through Vietnam and stumbled across an establishment called The Apocalypse Now Bar, named after the 1979 Francis Ford Coppola movie.  Given the film's stunningly bleak depiction of war in Vietnam, Garland saw the contrast as ironic. Using poetry, music, set design — and yes, story — Coppola was able to construct a movie with a message that reaches across decades. One that holds so much cultural cachet that a bar owner in Vietnam was willing to ignore the blood-soaked title, and use its allure to attract starry-eyed Western backpackers.

Garland and Mendoza view making a movie with that level of manufactured emotion as a mistake, and it wasn't something they wanted to repeat.

"There are anti-war films that exist," Garland said at the Q&A. "But something that is really unfiltered, and is trying to be as honest as it possibly can, seems to me to have value."

The goal is admirable. François Truffaut is often quoted as saying, "It is impossible to make an anti-war film." That's because the limited scope and implicit artistic bias of cinema necessarily leads to a glorification of war instead of an indictment of it.