It’s not going quite well to call War A war film. At least not in the traditional sense. War films generally have arcs and scope; They seek a meaning in violence. WarThe objectives are more direct. According to co -directors Alex Garland (Civil war,, Annihilation,, Ex machina) and the former Navy Seal Ray Mendoza, the goal of the film was to put the viewers instead of his soldier characters and to communicate as much as possible the true experience of modern war. The best sign that the pair has succeeded in its mission is that War It looks much more like a horror film than an ordinary war film.
War is based on the real experiences of Mendoza in Iraq during the battle of Ramadi – more specifically, a single mission where a navy seals peloton was supposed to provide overwatch from the interior of an Iraqi house. The first minutes of the film allowed us to see the methodical process while the team inflicts the house, taking care of the two Iraqi families who live there. Then, the exhausting part of the mission begins, while a member of the team was monitoring a market on the other side of the street, and the rest is simply sitting and waiting for something to go wrong.
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He ends up drawing the attention of insurgent fighters, who embusing the house, then mainly assimilating the seat, trapping the team inside. From there, the film becomes a life or death struggle for survival, while the team tries both to escape and save several injured members of the team.
But to communicate all this effectively, the public needs to feel the same tension and the same fear that the soldiers would have felt in real life. To do this, Garland and Mendoza intelligently turn to the mechanics of the genus film that makes these feelings the best: horror. Garland’s career as a director has always been on the outskirts of horror, with the confusing provocation of 2022 Men Being his most obvious attempt to the genre and his worst film from afar. Meanwhile, this is Mendoza’s first outing as a director, but above all worked as an advisor in other war films in the past. But the two directors plunge into the kind of horror here.
War is full of jumping fears, punctuated by gunshots and explosions instead of gusts of strings on the soundtrack. The film is made up of the same kind of anticipation as a slasher film could build while the main characters look at an apparently empty wood stretch. The camera dwells on this type of potentially threatening space – in this case, alleys and streets rather than a dark forest – with the constant threat of sudden attacks building tension at almost unbearable levels. Meanwhile, the perspective we obtain is always carefully fixed on the soldiers we follow, with a danger that apparently hides at every street corner, and threatening sounds from all directions.
Image: A24
As intelligent as the use of this cinematographic language is however, it is easy to imagine how it could slip into unfortunate and ugly implications. If War Communicates his tension and horror as a monster film, what does that say about the people that the seals are fighting? Fortunately, Mendoza and Garland avoid this comparison in different ways. On the one hand, there is never any doubt about the film which launches the Seal as an invasive force, both in this house and in the country as a whole. The film frequently returns to captive Iraqi families who live in the besieged house and notes the general indifference of the Seal to the fear of civilians of the gunshots and the American forces themselves.
In addition, the film constantly underlines the strange uselessness of the conflict it represents. In fact, the whole film seems adapted to a perfect metaphor for the invasion of Iraq – a difficult, dangerous and costly occupation which has largely led to a difficult, dangerous and costly retirement. It is a strong position, in particular for someone who fought in the conflict, but it also allows Garland and Mendoza to focus on the horror of the experiences of the seals while keeping the film supported above the coarse dehumanization which afflicts films like films like American elite shooter.
Image: A24
More than simple cinematographic tips, however, which really crosses War In horror territory is its accent on the body. All horror, from zombie films to slashers with psychological horror, is intrinsically rooted in the physical beings of the characters. Sometimes it means looking at them to be hacked by a Jason Voorhees type, being possessed by a demon or undergoing a more literal transformation in a body of horror of the body. But it doesn’t matter where horror begins, it always ends with the body.
War is not different. Garland and Mendoza choose to use war against terrorism as their animated supernatural force, but in this film, they are just as focused on the physical effects of this force like any other horror film. Both before the conflict and more in terms of, Garland and Mendoza are obsessed with us showing the body of their characters and the physical assessment of war against terrorism.
In a scene, at the start of the film, we see a soldier providing intel via Overwatch, lying above a stack of cushions for hours, fixing a sniper telescope and signaling the smallest movements of people on a market. It is a wonderfully terrible scene, with a more prudent and more effective tension construction work than almost any horror film this year. But it looks more like a side effect of what the film really tries to show us: how really this soldier is really difficult. After what seems to be hours in this position, the soldier finally asks someone else to take over so that he can work the cramps of his legs. Meanwhile, everyone around him looks beaten, worn in the sun, dehydrated and completely exhausted. And it is before only one blow was drawn.
Image: A24
When the fight starts, however, it all starts to take a more familiar horror film form. The injured characters slow down the group and need constant care, trapping the team inside the house they requisitioned. And again, the filmmakers intelligently borrow from horror, giving us a configuration that seems perfectly familiar. Tensions are rising and temperatures are starting to crash; Some soldiers lose their composure and panic, while others have completely closed. If you remove all the pistols and air support (like the film finally), it is a conventional horror film configuration: some frightened teenagers, stuck in a place where they should never have entered.
In the wounds themselves, Mendoza and Garland double their accent on the bodies and the physical assessment of the war. Whether from bullets or explosions, injuries War could compete with the gore of any horror film. Makeup and effects seem to be confronted with the stomach and do an excellent job to sell the real danger of the situation of seals and the real physical damage of the war.
But Mendoza and Garland do not limit these physical signifiers to men who have taken lost blows or members. Instead, they let the boom explosions ring in our ears for full minutes after their arrival, and show us that the soldiers decompose while they listen to their friends and their fellows from the squad. There is even a character who goes through a kind of panic attack in the idle, wonderfully communicated with both a fantastic performance of Will Poulter and barely perceptible, but incredibly shocking, trembling of the camera when we see him in close -up.
Image: A24
What separates War Other horror films are that most of them would play these moments for fast shocks and terrifying fears. But the goal of Garland and Mendoza is to transport us to this world, to give us an approximate version of the real experiences of these soldiers. So they make us intelligently sit with all of this, letting noise and blood infiltrate and invade us. The constant ringtone in the ears of the characters, the cries that do not stop or merge in the background, the misery of the heat while each character pours sweat, the hammer of the gunfire just outside the walls of the house – they all combine in an omnipresent rifle which is undeniably effective for the flavored nerves and disorientated viewers.
The Garland and Mendoza combat simulacrum would always have limits how it could take us to real war. As the film itself clearly does it, there is no experience in the world as this type of fight. But by intelligently relying on the tools of horror films rather than on war films, the co-networks have so far made one of the most tense and scary films of the year, as well as some of the most heartbreaking cinematographic fights ever turned.
War is in theaters now.
