Film Review: WARFARE (2025): An Intense and Harrowing Experience Undermined by a Lack of Sufficient Characterizations
Warfare Review
Warfare (2025) Film Review, a movie written and directed by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza and starring D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Cosmo Jarvis, Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, Aaron Mackenzie, Alex Brockdorff, Finn Bennett, Evan Holtzman, Michael Gandolfini, Joe Macaulay, Jake Lampert, Laurie Duncan, Aaron Deakins, Henrique Zaga, Kit Connor, Noah Centineo, Taylor John Smith and Adain Bradley.
Warfare is technically the most proficient movie of the year thus far. When taking into consideration the quality of the cinematography and sound effects editing, it’s nearly flawless. A movie about the Iraq War set around 19 years ago, this picture gets off to a wild start that one doesn’t realize is going to be serving as rare character development within the film for the group of Navy SEALs that the picture portrays. Based on a true story, Warfare tells the audience through words that this is based on real accounts, but the picture only feels truly authentic in its battle sequences. Some of the tracking shots throughout the movie are reminiscent of the intense last moments of co-director Alex Garland’s last film, the far superior Civil War. There is minimal, if any, character development in Warfare, but that’s most likely the point. Each man is equally important and if there was favoritism towards one of the characters, it would probably change the whole dynamic of the movie.
Warfare was also co-directed by Ray Mendoza, a veteran who is played well in the film by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai. This film tells the tale of an abandoned house occupied by SEALs who eventually try to save at least one of their own who is severely injured. As for the central character who is injured, his leg is badly scarred and gauze and medicine are greatly needed to ensure his survival. This film doesn’t show much of the enemy, but the enemy attacks occur when our characters don’t seem to expect them. One humorous scene has a couple of SEALs making funny bodily motions as they move forward with the rest of the crew. This part stands out because it gives the two characters a bit of a sense of authenticity instead of just being two general members of the SEAL team. Their humanity shines through in this brief section.
This movie opens with the group of guys watching an exercise video with some shapely women working out. The guys watch attentively as an upbeat old song plays loudly in the background. This is the defining character development of the early part of the movie as each man seems equally fascinated by the video. Directors Garland and Mendoza don’t show any sort of different responses to the video. All the men are in unison in terms of their fascination with the video. There is a reason for that and it makes sense.
Pretty soon, the SEALs are thrown into a situation where a family is discovered in a house in which the SEALs end up hiding in. It’s hard to know if this family is dangerous or not, but these people seem to be a normal family on the surface. Then, the movie goes on to consist mostly of tracking shots of the men as they move throughout the house and the surrounding area and try to escape with their lives intact. Though the aforementioned injured SEAL remains a major problem to overcome, the group of guys band together with the intentions of survival for all.
Casting choices are uniformly strong. Will Poulter and Cosmo Jarvis are two of the standouts although all the performers are pretty authentic in terms of the way they inhabit the characters. Here, the acting is about how the SEALs must navigate their surroundings and try to survive at any cost. There’s plenty of tension even if the character development is almost non-existent other than in the most simplistic terms, but like I said, that could be the point.
Warfare closes with an interesting scenario. Real-life SEALs are shown who the characters in the film are based upon. Some of them have their faces blurred out when the picture of the real SEAL is shown beside their character in the movie, most likely for privacy reasons and to give respect to the respective SEAL. I don’t want to tell you who else we see because it would ruin the suspense of the film regarding a key development in the plot. Though the choice to close the film on this note appears to be heartfelt, the movie may have seemed stronger with a less showy emotional finish.
Movies about survival during wartime are rarely as realistic as Warfare is in terms of their action scenes. This film nails the attempt to show what it’s like, first hand, to be in the middle of the violence and directly in the chaos. Like I said, the sound effects editing is superlative and the whole surrounding area the SEALs are immersed in is perfectly conveyed from a cinematic standpoint. While it’s not mandatory to show characters’ personal dilemmas, it can help to bring the violence into focus and give it some deeper meaning. Here, the lack of personal character development could be the film’s strongest asset and its greatest liability simultaneously. Warfare is a good film, but it needed a little more of something to make it a perfect one.
Rating: 7/10
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