Warfare (2025)

'Warfare' ends up as expected: bleak and miserable. The sound design is truly outstanding, such fine work ensures that you hear and feel everything. The plot being told in real time makes it rather captivating too, the tone of either trepidation or torment is omnipresent. Well, I say omnipresent, that's taking out the opening scene. I was not expecting that! Very fun though and a good way to show a snapshot of the camaraderie. It shouldn't work because it's not like it matches the rest of the film, but I gotta say I really loved it. What a tune, by the way. It's a fairly stacked cast list, from Will Poulter to Joseph Quinn to Charles Melton to Michael Gandolfini to D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai. No-one actually stands out individually, but I think that's entirely a good thing because it obviously isn't a story about any one person - it's about all of them.

A squad of American soldiers seemingly randomly select an house in Ramadi and having relocated it’s sleeping occupants to the ground floor, set up a sniper station from where they can monitor the goings on around them. Initially, this all looks harmless enough as the Iraqi locals go about their business, but gradually the spotters become suspicious of repetitive activity, the odd person who seems to be snooping on them - and then, well all hell breaks loose leaving them facing an existential threat that will test their mettle, their equipment and require some feats of legerdemain if they are to survive long enough to be rescued. There is quite some intensity to this drama as the young men under siege must each deal with their fears, strengths and weaknesses under a constant stream of fire. Will Poulter’s “Erik” leads the team, but the best effort for me came from his comms man “Ray” (D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai) and, though sparingly, from Kit Connor’s rookie “Tommy” who, like us watching, had no idea what they were doing in this house and what the purpose of their mission actually was in the first place. There isn’t so much a script as an increasingly nervous dialogue that disintegrates as their predicament becomes more perilous and the photography and particularly the audio serve really well in conveying a sense of the lethally claustrophobic atmosphere in which these men had to function. Real veterans wrote the story, advised the production and that shows in something that is certainly incomplete from a narrative perspective, but is uncomfortably enthralling to watch and graphically displays the horrors of urban warfare.