‘Warfare’ Review: A Visceral, Pulse-Pounding Immersion Into the Firefight From Hell

Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza have teamed up to deliver a pulverizing war film that drops viewers headfirst into combat with little explanation or reprieve. Warfare isn’t about plot or politics. It’s about immediacy—the kind of gut-deep panic and chaos that most of us will never truly understand. Garland, following his recent dystopian entry Civil War, has stripped back any narrative style here, diving directly into the sensations of violence, fear, and raw survival.

The opening scene is startlingly offbeat: a group of soldiers are laughing over an early-2000s music video, a moment of crass levity before their reality collapses. There’s something chilling about this slice of youthful testosterone and routine that suddenly morphs into a brutal, sustained fight for life. It’s not just a tonal shift—it’s a statement. This is the last moment of normalcy these men will know.

What follows is not your typical war drama. There’s no grandiose soundtrack swelling beneath acts of heroism, no backstories neatly tying characters together. The film takes place in Iraq in 2006, where a Navy SEAL unit occupies a civilian apartment to observe suspected insurgents. For nearly half an hour, the film hovers in a state of silent tension, the waiting is excruciating.

Then, all at once, chaos detonates. A grenade rips through their temporary post, and the calm unravels into panic. Dust, blood, and shrapnel fill the screen. The sound design is immersive—so much so that it feels like an assault on the senses. As the camera stumbles through smoke and screaming, we lose all bearings, mirroring the soldiers’ own disorientation.

The second half of the film turns into a desperate attempt to extract from a kill zone, with air support rendered impossible by snipers. The panic becomes nearly unbearable, not because the film is over-stylized, but because it isn’t. The pacing is relentless. Every moment is a potential last.

Seeing Warfare in IMAX only deepens the film’s visceral grip. The sheer scale of the image and the detail in the audio design make it feel like you’re in the room, in the blast, in the gunfire. Every sound rattles your bones; every flash of light stuns your vision. It’s not just viewing the film it’s being enveloped by it. The physicality of the IMAX experience transforms this movie in terms of immersion. It’s overwhelming in the best and most terrifying way.

‘Warfare’ is less a film than an ordeal—one that leaves the audience breathless, shaken, and profoundly sobered.

There’s no conventional arc here. Warfare is episodic, fragmented, brutal. Communication between the men is curt and utilitarian. We come to understand who they are only through their reactions to catastrophe. Their loyalty, their fear and their split-second decisions under fire. Garland and Mendoza have taken a minimalist approach that heightens every moment. There’s no soundtrack to cue emotion. The soundtrack is the thunder of distant explosions, the hiss of radios, the scream of bullets overhead. The film trusts its performances and its realism to carry the emotional weight.

The performances are grounded and natural, featuring an ensemble of rising talent including Joseph Quinn, Charles Melton, Kit Connor, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai as Ray Mendoza himself. Their portrayals don’t feel like actors “playing soldiers” they feel like men just trying to survive, stripped of ego or artifice.

What makes Warfare stand apart is its resistance to glamorising anything. It’s not a tribute to valor. It’s a confrontation with trauma. There are no speeches, no big moments of redemption. Just relentless dread, small mercies, and the unshakable sense that nothing will ever be the same for those who walk away.

Built entirely from Mendoza’s firsthand experiences and shaped with Garland’s cinematic intensity, Warfare is less a film than an ordeal—one that leaves the audience breathless, shaken, and profoundly sobered. It may not teach us what it’s like to be at war, but it gets closer than almost anything that’s come before.

Warfare is now playing in theater worldwide.

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