The greatest war movies would know how to use sound as a vital component to punctuate the scenery. Francis Ford Coppola did this with Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries’ soaring arias as American military helicopters swoop in on a Vietnamese village in Apocalypse Now. Alex Garland’s contribution to the great war films in cinema is warranted with his latest film Warfare.
Instead of some epic opera, Garland jars the audience with film history’s most unusual opening music for a war movie: Eric Prydz’s earworm hit from 2004, “Call on Me.”
It is a juxtaposition of a campy music video of hip thrusts with a group of American military men in full battle gear watching and dancing along with the video. This is like their pre-mission pump-up session. This will be the only time the soldiers will be smiling and laughing. Then, the rest of the movie is without any music.
There are no soundtracks laid over the scenes. But this movie should be one of the greatest films for sound engineering because war is brought to you with the gunfire, the heavy breathing, and, at one time, radio chatter with crumbling walls, rebel gunfire, and screams of pain with the on-and-off switch of the audio to simulate tinnitus. You are listening to warfare beating from the cinema speakers, which makes you wonder if this is also the soldiers’ palpitating hearts.
Garland takes on another American military-industrial complex filmography, but this time, it is about “memories” of those who were at the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003. The film stars today’s hottest Hollywood stars, but chaos, dirt, and screams tend to oscillate between characters, which makes it hard to tell them apart. This is the film’s strength because it is not a superstar vehicle but a retelling of a mission.
Many war movies rely on a grand adventure. Warfare is not about a journey or a descent into madness but about containment, unease of movement, and extraction.
When asked where the soldiers are, they radioed one of the best lines in a war film: “Look for the blood and the smoke, we’re there.” Garland situates this with the men being stuck in an Iraqi house, the color of sand and smoke, with red windows. The interiors are awash with this red glow as the soldiers try to manage the mangled bodies.
There is no romantic character study or an interiority of self-discovery. There is something about the absence of such plot points in an American war movie because it is usually a positioning of heroics and exceptionalism.
Garland puts the film in an off-kilter take amidst a banality—that this movie is just one day of the thousands of days of the collective American military geopolitical incursions worldwide. Garland has given us a gift wrapped in dismembered limbs of crimson and dirt from a war movie of young men who are easily shattered as they try to leave a scene of chaos, which is, unfortunately, just one day in their mission.
You may reach Chong Ardivilla at kartunistatonto@gmail.com or chonggo.bsky.social