Warfare Is a Blow By Blow Account of Life Under Fire

One of Director Alex Garland’s most standout scenes in Civil War had to be the raid on the White House. It felt visceral and real. On set to help make that happen was Iraq War Veteran Ray Mendoza as an advisor. As they shot the film Mendoza enraptured Garland with his war stories, one in particular caught his attention, a scouting operation in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006. As Navy Seals they were tasked with helping clear a route for the army to pass through later. The house they set up in was a deathtrap, and they start to take casualties. One of Mendoza’s friends, Elliot Miller, didn’t make it out with his legs intact, and couldn’t remember much of the day at all. This movie is cobbled together using the memories of the guys involved, and is something of a letter to their friend.

“It’s hard for Elliott to visualize these events in literary form, but many of us remember it because we were there, even if we have only fragments of memory,” says Mendoza. “I remember what the house looked like, what the street looked like, what it smelled like, and who was there. Others remember different things, from different perspectives. We wanted to create a living snapshot for Elliott so he could experience it himself.”

As a movie it shakes out to be an experience outside of the regular film format. It takes place in near real time with no character progression and hardly even a sense of individual characters names. When you’re with a group of guys getting shot at you aren’t likely to see many epiphanies occurring in the hour and a half you’re there. The screaming of the wounded doesn’t stop because it would be nicer viewing, it happened, so it stays in. There aren’t any awesome shots of baddies getting gunned down. You never have the sense that anybody is really winning, except perhaps the jihadists who aren’t treated like gormless stormtroopers for a change.

What you do see is entirely unvarnished. It makes no bones of the fact that the Iraqi interpreters are cannon fodder, or that these soldiers have just taken over a house with a family in it in the dead of night with guns and sledgehammers. Lesser publications like The Guardian were shocked that it didn’t go into more finger wagging depth about the morality of these decisions. As if a few more movies like Matt Damon’s Green Zone would really move the needle on us not doing war and traumatizing civilians ever again. This movie is matter of fact about it, shit happens, and it doesn’t look cool or heroic. That’s as anti-war as you can possibly get, and this movie achieves it more deftly in a few moments than other more earnest films can in their entire runtimes.

The moment to moment decisions are speckled with the sort of humour and mess ups you’d expect from twenty somethings in a tight spot. It’s always subtle, and it always lands.

This isn’t a film for everyone, but for those that it is for, buckle up, you’re in for an immersive ride.