All is unfair in war and imperialism
dir: Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza
2025
This is… the kind of film that you watch when you’re fascinated by war films, but which is completely unlike every other war film you can think of or have seen so far.
To be sure, it’s just like every war film that has people yelling things, wearing uniforms, shooting at people, explosions, all that shit. But. And this is such a big but. It has none of the other elements that everyone has come to love and expect in the war content they are consuming.
There are no character arcs. There is no heroism. There is no extraneous dialogue whatsoever. There is no success beyond a number of people surviving. There is no achievement of anything other than surviving. There is no explanation for why these Navy SEALS were where they were when they had this terrible, no good, very bad day, no justification for it, and no “it was for the greater good” or any other ironic rationale supplied.
They were there, they were professional and competent, it didn’t help them, most of them survived.
We watch a very competent team of SEALS follow a path to a specific house in Ramadi in 2006 during the second Iraq War (the one started by Pres. George W Bush which was apparently a complete success, Mission Accomplished, good job everyone, five stars). They sneak into a compound with a two-storey house, waking and frightening the families living there but not shooting them, for some reason, and then just setting up shop and waiting, waiting, waiting.
What are they waiting for? Maybe for Godot, but otherwise I have no idea, they never tell us specifically what they were there for. They watch, quietly, with snipers, drones, their own eyes, to see how people, being guys with explosives and AKs and grenades and stuff, are going to react to their presence in the house. Even though they’re being quiet, as in not making their presence obvious, they have no illusions that the local community doesn’t know that they’re there.
Still they watch and wait, at least the ones tasked to do so, like the sniper Elliot (Cosmo Jarvis), or the guy on the radio who is constantly chattering and clearly the character co-director Ray Mendoza is based on (played by D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai). Other guys do push ups or stand around awkwardly. Most of them have precise things to do and do them precisely. Everything is done by the book, and using the language that presumably they used way back then. They’re all fairly young men, but despite what might seem as their youth, some have seen more conflict than others. They mock gunner Tommy (Kit Connor) for his “young guy energy”, for not knowing what to do with himself, but really they’re mocking him for not being hardened yet like the rest of them.
It’s like watching 16 year olds mock 15 year olds for being too fresh faced and innocent.
However hard they might be, this is not a story where hardened vets prevail over callow freshers, where experienced officers triumph where newbies quale and collapse. When the attacks come, they are all pretty much helpless, no matter how many guns they have, no matter how much external or overhead support they have: once the whole community starts coming after them and throwing explosives at them, they’re all pretty much helpless in the face of it. They’re not cowardly, they’re not frightened, they’re stunned.
They might as well be shooting at a fast approaching hurricane. An initial attack leaves two chaps lightly wounded, two old pros, but following standard procedure they organise to have them evacuated for medical treatment even with the attacks happening sporadically outside. We see and hear how that would have been organised and all the elements thereof. Everything is so complicated. The way this flick is done is that we see how highly trained SEALs are meant to act when this happened, when this kind of stuff presumably happens. You could argue that in other flicks all these “boring” bits are taken out, and we just get all the heroic action. This flick is aiming for painstaking realism, mostly, I think, because the guy this happened to wants to honour the chaps he served with, some of whom ended up horrifically mangled, and the best way to do that is to replicate everything as much as humanly possible.
As they try to evacuate the two wounded chaps, something even worse happens, killing the translators who were working with them (and leaving them in pieces on the road outside), and mangling the two men who were only lightly injured before.
From bad to worse. Before they tried to evacuate them because they didn’t want their chaps to get harmed further, now Elliot and Sam (Joe Quinn) have legs that look like they’ve gone through a shredder, and Sam can’t stop screaming.
This flick has no score or soundtrack, at least during the flick’s running time (I think there are songs over the end credits), so the sound design is even more prominent, and it’s hideous in its specificity. There are long sections where the people onscreen are temporarily deaf, so we experience that woozy sensation by having the sound cut out in uncomfortable, smothering ways. When wounded characters are screaming, we really hear it, and it is a good long while before it abates.
When the soldiers shoot back at the people attacking them, I’m telling you, I don’t know if this is a spoiler, but it’s a definite choice on the part of the filmmakers, I can’t say for sure if they hit a single enemy. All those thousands of bullets, claymore mines set off, shots from the Bradley tanks at other buildings and rooftops, and we never see an enemy combatant fall.
It has an effect, I don’t know if it’s ironic, and I don’t know if its purpose is to say “this is not the film to be watching for catharsis, this is the opposite of that”, but there’s something almost profound about it. I’m not saying this flick is profound – it aspires to too much verisimilitude for that to be possible, even though anti-artistic choices are still choices, in the end. I think there is something unusual with a flick like this with, you know, actors and such, paring itself down to the absolute essentials in order to convey only what Ray Mendoza remembers about that horrible day. Any number of other studios (apart from A24, which exists to be this obtuse) would have said “sure you can make your war flick, but you need to license these songs from Bon Jovi and have Glenn Powell, Timothee Chalomet and Tom Hanks in it, and lots of sad trumpet music, and it better end in triumph!”
This flick says no, there was no glory that day, no greater good, no victory over the infidel. There were brothers-in-arms who survived only because they would give their lives to save each other, and do their duty, in that order. But that they survived was a combination of luck AND someone being convinced to impersonate a superior officer, which could have gotten them horribly court martialled, but that’s by the by. They did what they had to in order to survive (against their own hierarchy), so God love ‘em for it.
When another group of Marines arrive, they don’t know these wounded guys, so when they accidentally step on the legs of the hideously wounded SEAL team members, or barge into them, they barely even notice. It’s confronting, for us in the audience, because for the longest time with been with the one set of guys, and see this other bunch of callous jerks, even if they’ve saved their bacon, as arseholes. But we want “our” guys to be okay, even if the new jerks don’t care about them.
There is so much painstaking detail, and little in the way of comic relief, but there’s some humour there. These guys have a shorthand of references, of goofy in-jokes only hinted at, which connects them even if we don’t know what it means. It matters that they know, that they feel it. Because this is an unsentimental retelling, and it’s a surprisingly short film in that it’s only 90 minutes long, which is almost unheard of for war movies, which often go over two, two and a half hours (because they’re so fucking important, you see) we’re neither given enough time to bond with them nor to learn enough about them to care about them as characters, and that’s okay, because we’re naturally going to prefer them to be okay rather than mangled (unless you’re a sadist, in which case I can’t help you). But we’re not being emotionally manipulated into caring about them because of a story about when they were working at a lingerie shop and fitting women for bras that were way too small for them, or talking about their high school sweethearts and how they hope to marry them when they get home. None of that. We should care because we should want these young chaps not to be deployed to these places, not to have to become hardened, not to have to live with wounds physical and mental, disabilities, PTSD and worse, just so America or any Empire can feel great about itself again.
And in the end, they achieved absolutely nothing, absolutely fucking nothing. It’s in the film. Call me a liar to my face, I’ll point to the end of this flick, and I will say “you saw what I saw, yeah?”
An amazing flick, and no, it’s not pro-war. This flick doesn’t say “war is hell, but at least we won”. It says “War is pointless, and my brothers and sisters got mangled for nothing.”
8 times this is no recruitment ad out of 10
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“We have two severely wounded…”
- “Who’s severely wounded?”
“Not you.” - Warfare
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