Will Poulter and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai in “Warfare.”
A24Warfare — director Alex Garland’s follow-up to last year’s hit Civil War — is new in theaters. Does the real-time war film have the critics standing at attention?
Co-directed by Garland and Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza, the official summary for the film reads, “Warfare embeds audiences with a platoon of American Navy SEALs on a surveillance mission gone wrong in insurgent territory. A visceral, boots-on-the-ground story of modern warfare and brotherhood, told like never before: in real-time and based on the memory of the people who lived it.”
Rated R, Warfare plays in Thursday previews before opening in theaters on Friday. The film stars Charles Melton, Will Poulter, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Cosmo Jarvis, Joseph Quinn and Kit Connor.
Warfare is a creation pulled from the memories of real-life Navy SEALs including Mendoza from a harrowing mission in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006. Mendoza previously helped Garland design the battle scenes for 2024’s Civil War.
As of this publication, Warfare has earned a 93% “fresh” rating from Rotten Tomatoes critics based on 54 reviews. The RT Critics Consensus reads, “Narratively cut to the bone and geared up with superb filmmaking craft, Warfare evokes the primal terror of combat with unnerving power.”
Note: The trailer below contains swearing and scenes of violence.
What Are Individual Critics Saying About ‘Warfare’?
Among the top critics on RT who give Warfare a “fresh” rating is Michael Ordoña of The Wrap, who writes, “Perhaps the most effective way to convey that war is hell is to dump all the metaphors, story beats and shoehorned character development and just put the viewer in it, which this film accomplishes in a way very rarely seen in narrative cinema.”
Justin Chang also gives Warfare a “fresh” rating on RT, writing his New Yorker review, “Certainly, it is hard to come away from “Warfare,” with its soldiers’ screams still ringing in your ears, and see the American military’s presence in Iraq as anything but a violent, misguided intrusion.”
G. Allen Johnson gives Warfare a “fresh” review on RT as well, writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, “It is remarkably nonjudgmental, presenting an incident that is neither moral nor amoral, but truthful and awful.”
The Washington Post’s Ann Hornaday also had a positive take on Warfare, writing in her review on RT, “[Co-director Ray] Mendoza has crafted a taut, harrowing reenactment that initially brings to mind the adage that war can best be described as interminable boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.”
Owen Gleiberman of Variety is among Warfare’s detractors on RT, writing in his “rotten” review, “It scrapes every last bit of romantic glamour off the image of combat, and I guess you could say that’s an achievement. But it’s an achievement, in this case, that seems to be saluting itself.”
Also giving Warfare a “rotten” review on RT is Gregory Nussen of Deadline Hollywood Daily, who writes, “While it aims for an unromantic portrait of combat, it can only conceive of doing so through haptic recreation in lieu of actual characterization. The result is a cacophonous temper tantrum, a vacuous and perfidious advertisement for military recruitment.”
Warfare plays in Thursday previews before opening in theaters on Friday.
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