The Brutal True Story Behind Warfare

IF THE NEW movie Warfare gives you a sense of déjà vu, you’re not alone. The hyperrealist A24 war drama, depicting events from the Iraq War, comes from writer and director Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Annihilation), who just last year delivered Civil War, a jittery if opaque imagining of a future conflict-torn America.

But Warfare is a very different beast. Not only because Garland is working with a co-writer and co-director, Ray Mendoza, but because the film is based on a very real firefight that Mendoza experienced as a Navy SEAL in 2006.

“As soon as Ray told me the story, I realized this wasn’t something that would make sense for me to conventionally direct,” Garland told Empire.

Viewers will notice that Warfare is dedicated to “Elliott,” also a former SEAL who experienced traumatic brain injury in the battle, and as a result has no memory of what occurred. “It can be hard for veterans to talk about an experience,” Mendoza said in the same Empire piece. “Now he can show this to his kids, who have questions all the time. If you don’t remember, it’s hard to explain.”

The harrowing texture of what real war is like on a second-by-second level informs every choice in Warfare, which unfolds in real time. But who is Mendoza? How did he and Garland collaborate to create a particularly authentic, process-obsessed war movie like no other? Here, Men’s Health breaks down everything to know about the mission that fueled its jarring scenes of combat, and how that shapes the experience of watching Warfare.

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What’s the true story behind Warfare? How did the movie come about?

Warfare depicts, as faithfully as possible (hey, it is a fictionalized Hollywood film, after all), a 2006 mission in Ramadi, Iraq, in which former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza was involved, as Variety reports. Mendoza, the co-writer and co-director, had the idea for a movie recreation of the mission, but it wasn’t until he met Garland that the two started bringing it to life.

Mendoza was a military advisor on Garland’s previous movie, Civil War, helping to inject a veracity and cinéma vérité style to what was largely a what-if premise about a dystopian United States torn into violent factions.

During production, Garland noticed the realistic detail that Mendoza infused into a climactic scene in which soldiers (and the journalists who are the main characters) navigate their way through a White House corridor toward the Oval Office.

“It had a kind of electricity attached to it,” Garland explained in a Q&A screening for Warfare, per Variety. “What I could see floating out was some truth, some reality about how these guys function.”

And when Mendoza opened up about his own Iraq War tales, Garland lit up. He had been interested in recreating lived experience as “forensically as possible, and doing it in real time,” he told Empire.

And so Garland and Mendoza embarked on Warfare, in which Mendoza is played by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (Reservation Dogs, Hell of a Summer). Other stars include Shōgun star Cosmo Jarvis (as Elliott Miller), Will Poulter, Kit Connor, Joseph Quinn, Michael Gandolfini, Charles Melton, and Noah Centineo. While Elliott gets the dedication, many of the real-life identities of the SEALs involved are undisclosed, ostensibly for safety and privacy reasons.

What happened in the actual Iraq War mission depicted in Warfare?

The 2006 operation at the heart of Warfare, as mentioned, took place in Ramadi, which is about 70 miles west of Baghdad. Mendoza was partly motivated to distill this chapter because of Elliott.

“When Elliott woke up, he immediately started asking questions,” Mendoza said. “He doesn’t have that core memory.” After many efforts to provide an accurate account, Mendoza thought a movie mining the memories might offer closure.

As for those memories, Mendoza recounted to NPR of the mission, “Counterinsurgency was the focus at the time. Ramadi was considered kind of the hotbed of the insurgency. And the goal was to go in and to take back Ramadi sector by sector. And we were to provide overwatch for those missions.”

According to Military.com, the objective for the SEALs was to “occupy a local Iraqi home as a base to perform their overwatch mission. It was a common tactic during the war, and Iraqi homeowners were provided vouchers they could redeem with the Americans to cover any damages to their personal property as a result of the SEALs’ operations. The kind of mission seen in Warfare is really standard operating procedure—so standard, in fact, that even the enemy knows where they are and what they’re doing.”

Unsurprisingly, things went awry over the course of this day in Ramadi.

Warfare’s granular detail jumps out at you from the opening scene, in which SEALs watch the music video for the 2004 hit “Call On Me” by Eric Prydz, a seemingly dissonant bit in a serious, violent war film.

“If it didn’t happen on that day, it wasn’t going to be in the film,” Mendoza remembers. In 2006, “you can’t stream movies or content like you can now. And in a place like Iraq, where a lot of times you have to entertain yourself, you know, videos get passed around via USB drives, and this is one of many videos. But this one just caused us to be—it was just fun. Obviously, there’s some beautiful women in it. There’s a guy in there. You know, it’s a bit comedic.

“And so, yeah, it was just something that stuck with us. And then we started watching it more and more until it became a kind of a ritual to watch before we went out.”

As for the ensuing chaos, Garland and Mendoza stage Warfare without commentary or even much exposition around the Iraq War, stripping the narrative down to its bare first-person essentials. But for Mendoza, it was always critical to give voice to Elliott, one of his best friends.

“Reliving it, I don’t think it was as hard as coming out of the military, understanding it, just transitioning into civilian world, figuring out what I wanted to do—some of those mechanisms we create to function every day when you see tragedy on that scale,” Mendoza said.

How does the Warfare movie compare?

Warfare can and will be hastily compared to Black Hawk Down except for the Iraq War, yet that doesn’t do its own blistering quality justice. Garland, a pioneer of new frontiers of visceral filmmaking, is so dedicated to his hyperrealism that at first you might wonder where the film is going. A bunch of dudes watching a catchy if dumb music video to amp themselves up? Funny. That uneasily shifts to them being listless as they wait for action.

The point is clear enough when that action comes with shattering force: These are men whose lives are both everyday, like anyone else’s, and constantly susceptible to almost unimaginable loss. Jargon-ish terms like “show of force” become vividly all-in-your-face-and-ears assault. And there is no shying away from realities like SEALs begging for air support only to be asked for their location (which hasn’t changed). One SEAL on comms responds, “look for smoke and blood.”

Garland and Mendoza stringently avoid politicizing the conflict in Warfare, but any depiction is bound to be political by its very nature. Non-insurgent Iraqis are left hopelessly confused by the madness. Still, the main thought one comes away with is what these military members got in return for their immense suffering, and whether we deserved—and continue to justify—that kind of sacrifice. It’s a question the movie, appropriately, leaves wide open.