Warfare 4K 2025

This is a powerful, bold, and honest film. Garland made it together with Ray Mendoza, a former soldier whom he met while filming The Fall of the Empire. Mendoza was working as a consultant at the time and apparently shared his personal story with Garland — what really happened to him in Iraq in 2006.

This film is not easy to recommend — but I would not want anyone to miss it. Warfare is more like a chamber theater production than a classic war action movie. There is almost no conventional plot. Marines take up positions in a residential building, find themselves trapped — and that's it. What follows is tense, exhausting anticipation, constant fear, and fire from all sides. There is no way out.

This is the perfect anti-war film. It's no surprise that Garland calls “Come and See” one of his favorite films — and it shows. War here is not heroic or grandiose. It is nothing but noise, disorientation, fear, and meaninglessness. You don't understand where the shots are coming from, why, or what to do. Just survive. Just don't go crazy.

It's cool that Garland again rejects the usual binary: as in The Fall of the Third Reich, he does not divide the sides into right and wrong. There are no villains here. The Iraqis are hardly shown — only silhouettes, shadows, flashes in the window. What is important is not politics or the geography of the conflict, but the state itself — fear, alienation, the feeling of being trapped.

The sound deserves a special mention — it is the main character here. The directors focus not on visual flourishes, but on the feeling of presence. Watch it only in the cinema. The heavy breathing of the sniper, the clatter of shell casings, the deafening shots, the cries of the wounded — it's as if you are sitting next to the soldiers, catching every sound.

This is a heavy, physically palpable film. But I'm glad it exists.