Warfare

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Warfare

Warfare
Warfare

WARFARE (2025): A visceral boots-on-the-ground war thriller that rewrites the modern combat movie playbook.

When A24 announced that Alex Garland (writer/director of Civil War, Annihilation) would co-write and co-direct a war film with Ray Mendoza—an Iraq War veteran and longtime military technical advisor—expectations ran high. The result, Warfare, is a lean, 95-minute, real-time descent into a surveillance mission that goes sideways, embedding us with a platoon of U.S. Navy SEALs and daring us to breathe normally again.

Quick facts (for the skimmers).

Title: Warfare

Release date: April 11, 2025 (theatrical)

Runtime: ~1h 35m; Rating: R

Directors/Writers: Ray Mendoza & Alex Garland

Studio/Distributor: A24

Premise: A SEAL platoon on a clandestine overwatch/surveillance op inside insurgent territory sees the plan unravel in real time.

How many cast members? (Principal cast).

Marketing and official listings present Warfare as an ensemble picture. The principal credited cast most consistently cited across studio materials and trade listings includes roughly 15 key on-screen players:

This core list appears on Rotten Tomatoes’ cast page (and matches what A24/Apple have foregrounded), with earlier casting news on Wikipedia lining up with many of the same names. Think of it as a tight ensemble of ~15 rather than a couple of headliners and faceless extras.

Box-office (“how means box collection”).

For a muscular, mid-budget A24 adult thriller, Warfare performed well:

  • Budget: about $20 million (reported)
  • Opening weekend (domestic): $8.32M
  • Final grosses: $26.0M domestic, $7.28M international, $33.28M worldwide

That’s a ~1.7× multiple on budget worldwide, and a strong domestic share (~78%). Not a four-quadrant blockbuster—but solid business for a gritty war film without superheroes or a legacy IP.

Warfare

Who is the main character?

Although Warfare operates as a true ensemble, the film’s primary point-of-view anchor is “Ray,” played by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai. The camera repeatedly returns to Ray’s perspective as the op deteriorates, and his choices—when to hold, when to exfil, when to risk exposure—become the film’s emotional and ethical battleground. Will Poulter (Erik) and Cosmo Jarvis (Elliott) function as crucial counterweights within the team dynamic, but Ray is the clearest avatar for the audience inside the chaos.

What’s the film’s niche?

Warfare occupies the “ultra-immersive, procedural war-thriller” niche: a real-time, boots-on-the-ground narrative that privileges tactics, comms discipline, spatial geography, and moral ambiguity over bombast. If Black Hawk Down distilled to an indie ethic and current tech, or if The Covenant shed melodrama for fieldcraft rigor—that’s the turf. Crucially, the film’s real-time conceit and Mendoza’s veteran eye give it a verité intensity that distinguishes it from traditional hero’s-journey war movies.

Deep-dive review (story, craft, themes).

1) Premise & structure: the op that won’t stop tightening.

Warfare begins with a SEAL platoon inserted into an urban overwatch position to observe insurgent movements while U.S. forces transit a contested zone. The initial goal is simple: surveil and report. But as civilians enter the picture and enemy patrol routes shift, the mission becomes a knot of micro-decisions—each one with deadly potential. The film’s real-time cadence means there’s no relief valve: no cutaways to brass briefings, no omniscient intel montage. We are where the team is—period. When the exfil clock starts ticking, tension compounds mathematically.

2) Character dynamics: leadership under pressure.

While the ensemble is uniformly strong, the “triangle” of Ray (D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai), Erik (Will Poulter), and Elliott (Cosmo Jarvis) shapes the film’s emotional topology. Ray’s instinct is to minimize footprint and preserve the mission’s observational integrity. Erik embodies that protective aggression common in elite units—he’ll break through the wall if that’s the only door out. Elliott is the quiet calculus, measuring risk vs. objective in the background. Friction is subtle, mostly coded through comms brevity, body language, and a glance that says “we’re already off the playbook.” When command (Lt. Macdonald, played by Michael Gandolfini) injects orders from afar, the latency between radio intent and on-ground reality becomes its own antagonist.

3) Staging & geography: clarity as a suspense engine.

One of Warfare’s masterstrokes is spatial clarity. The film rigorously establishes lines of sight, dead ground, ratlines, entry points, and fields of fire. When the team shifts rooms or elevates to another vantage, the camera takes us through the space, letting the audience internalize the floor plan. So when shots ring out or a door splinters, we feel exactly how exposed they are. This attention to micro-topography—rare in modern action—yields suspense that’s earned, not manufactured.

4) Sound & comms: the audio grammar of a mission.

Mendoza and Garland treat comms chatter as music. Warfare uses brevity code, call signs, and overlapping transmissions to create a sonic realism that’s never gibberish. You don’t need to be a vet to parse what matters; the film gives you just enough contextual scaffolding to decode tempo and stakes. When comms degrade—interference, distance, stress—the audience experiences operational blindness right alongside the team. That design choice, more than any CG explosion, is what makes Warfare feel immediate.

5) Real-time ethics: the morality of seconds.

Because events unfold minute-to-minute, ethical dilemmas hit with kinetic force. Do you break cover to prevent a civilian casualty and compromise the platoon? Do you hold fire and risk your overwatch collapsing? Warfare recognizes the tragic algebra of urban conflict: right choices can still have terrible outcomes. The script refuses to sermonize; it just presents consequences. In that sense, it’s closer to a procedural tragedy than a rah-rah combat yarn. Critics have highlighted this as the film “throwing out the war-movie playbook”—eschewing clear catharsis for a meditation on memory, responsibility, and the residue of choices.

6) Performance highlights.
  • D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai gives the movie its quiet pulse—his face a barometer for fear managed and decisions made.
  • Will Poulter leans into protective ferocity without losing the character’s humanity.
  • Cosmo Jarvis is the internal accountant, projecting the stress of calculation more than the heat of the moment.
  • Around them, Kit Connor, Finn Bennett, Taylor John Smith, Michael Gandolfini, and others fill out a unit that looks and moves like a cohesive organism rather than a star vehicle.
7) Direction & authorship: Mendoza’s eye, Garland’s build.

Garland has long been fascinated by systems under stress and men with guns in uncertain terrain (Ex Machina’s psychological chess, Annihilation’s shimmer patrol, Civil War’s embedded photographers). Here, he steps back to co-author with Mendoza, whose first-hand experience shapes every tactical beat. The movie’s discipline—camera placement, duration of shots, how long we’re forced to sit in exposure—is very much Mendoza’s grammar, with Garland’s structural rigor knitting it together. The A24 logline underscores that it’s “told in real time and based on the memory of the people who lived it.” That phrase is key: this is a memory movie as much as a mission movie.

8) The politics of depiction (without polemic).

Warfare is strikingly apolitical in rhetoric and yet political in effect. By refusing to argue grand strategy and focusing instead on street-level burdens, the film foregrounds the human cost of tactical success. You won’t find speeches about why we’re there; you’ll find moments of contact—a door cracked open to reveal a family, a child’s cry in the wrong hallway, a radio request that drags one moral choice into another. It’s a film about soldiers carrying time, one second at a time.

9) Craft snapshot: editing, color, and score.
  • Editing: clipped but legible; favors continuity of action over flashy montage.
  • Color: a dust-muted palette—sun-baked neutrals, frayed interiors, night-vision washes—keeps glamour at bay.
  • Score: often subtracted rather than added, yielding long stretches where diegetic sound (boots, breath, mics, distant engines) becomes the score.

Together, these choices keep Warfare in a narrow band of realism—tension comes from where bodies are and what they can or can’t do in the next beat.

10) Reception snapshot.

The film was warmly received by critics (Apple and Rotten Tomatoes pages highlight strong reviews), with write-ups noting its immersive method and formal boldness; several outlets tracked its steady box-office climb for an adult drama in a crowded spring corridor.

Why Warfare works (and sticks).

  1. Form equals content. The real-time device isn’t a gimmick—it’s the philosophical core. The movie argues that in war, morality is measured in seconds, not manifestos.
  2. Procedural intensity without macho mythmaking. The film respects craft (TTPs, comms, movement) without turning it into fetish. The SEALs are extraordinarily capable—and still, physics and probability bite back.
  3. Memory as battlefield. By framing events as something remembered, Warfare hints at the unreliable replay veterans carry, where guilt, pride, dread, and relief stack without ever fully canceling out.

Final verdict.

Warfare is the rare modern war film that feels small in footprint and large in consequence. It’s not here to decorate history; it’s here to trap you in the terrible arithmetic of a mission measured in breaths and heartbeats. If you crave war cinema that respects your intelligence—and your pulse—this belongs on your shortlist for the year.

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