"Warfare" - Anxiety, the Movie

“Warfare” is in the running for the best war film of all time. It so obviously has the best sound design that it frankly brooks no competition. You should see it in a theater while you can, or, when it comes out for home video, in a pitch black room with the best speaker system you can set up. Hooking it up to tinny laptop speakers is an insult.

This is despite it being a film where, on a macro level, not much happens. The setup is a MacGuffin that’s barely explained - a SEAL team is holed up providing some kind of passive support for another unit, and they are “made” and attacked before they can leave. That is the entire plot.

A lazy movie would demand an “audience stand in” - a new guy, or, God forbid, a journalist or some shit, who provides a reason for everyone to explain what they’re doing, “establish the stakes”, and so on. We discard that entirely - the presentation is completely cinema verite. The only concessions to the audience are subtitles for the two Iraqi translators as they speak to each other and the Iraqi family the team is temporarily quartered with. So the interesting thing about the movie is, by process of elimination, the micro-scale interactions.

I never deployed to Iraq, so I cannot speak to the “realism” of the film (although those who have seem to generally give it high marks). But what it does do is convey a very consistent impression of reality - that is, everything inside of it contextually supports everything else in subtle ways. It is complicated to manage a small scale firefight. You have at least a dozen people to keep track of, and must orient them in space to deal with the fact that there is a roof, multiple floors with windows, and a ground entrance to guard. Where is everyone? What is their state - are they wounded, running low on ammo, taking fire? Where is their equipment? What do you have available to you - is there a drone you can use to keep an eye on the neighborhood, can you summon a jet flyby to act as concealment and light concussion for a few seconds at an opportune moment? Where is your ground support coming from? How long until they get here?

Now add to this the fact that you have just taken a traumatic brain injury and are operating at half-capacity at best, while some of the men you are responsible for are badly wounded and in incoherent, screaming pain.

This is largely conveyed through the most anxiety-provoking sound design I’ve ever seen in a movie. Firing a rifle outdoors is loud. Firing a machine gun indoors is inconceivably loud, to the point where one gets the impression one is merely trying to disorient the enemy to the same extent you are inflicting on yourself. Lighting off explosives puts one beyond the realm of “sound” and into a kind of metaphysical disconnection-from-being. Obviously a movie theater cannot convey the raw levels involved - so we get the impression via tonal discontinuities, like refracted muzzle blast indoors coincident with the reactions of the actors, vs the “mere” crack and ricochet outdoors.

The whole movie manages these kinds of micro-interactions brilliantly, and the subtle one-on-one moments provide characterization without leaning into actors explaining themselves. No one is “doing a bit” - everything is at least apparently emergent from the circumstances in which they find themselves.

The tradeoff of this kind of micro-fidelity is that there is no inclination to explore “what it all means”. One could easily conclude - nothing. The final shot of the film is all the Iraqi fighters who have been peppering the SEALs’ position just from the ground level wandering out into the street - a horde you couldn’t possibly hope to defeat except for by wiping out the entire neighborhood. They are still there, and the Americans ultimately leave.

The temptation is to lean into the nihilism so hard it becomes a positive statement - tropes about “ultimately you’re fighting for the guy next to you, this says a lot about the state of man” etc. The film itself sardonically deboonks Bush-era “fighting for our freedom” in the first shot, as the fellas enjoy a pre-mission music video featuring presumably the first non hijab’d woman they’ve seen in months. “This is what we’re fighting for”, one of them exclaims, in a kind of unironic-but-not-really Millennial cant.

But really, Iraq was such an irredeemable conflict that the bravery and sacrifice displayed by combatants makes it worse - these men should never have been put in this situation. At a key point, one of them impersonates command radio to approve their own request for support, which was initially denied because their first rescue was attacked and incurred more casualties. What a perfect microcosm - a team sent to do a mission of unclear benefit, who suffer greatly, are initially hung out to dry, and are forced to more or less self-rescue, while achieving nothing and leaving a worse situation than when they arrived.