War Movies: What Are They Good For?

Critics at Large | The New Yorker

The New Yorker

Society & Culture

4.4 • 679 Ratings

🗓️ 17 April 2025

⏱️ 48 minutes

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Summary

For nearly as long as we’ve been waging war, we’ve sought ways to chronicle it. “Warfare,” a new movie co-directed by the filmmaker Alex Garland and the former Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, takes an unorthodox approach, recreating a disastrous real-life mission in Iraq according to Mendoza’s own memories and those of the soldiers who fought alongside him. On this episode of Critics at Large, Vinson Cunningham, Naomi Fry, and Alexandra Schwartz discuss how “Warfare” ’s visceral account brings us closer to a certain kind of truth, while also creating a space into which viewers can project their own ideologies. The hosts consider how artists have historically portrayed conflict and its aftermath—referencing Virginia Woolf’s depiction of a shell-shocked soldier in “Mrs. Dalloway” and Vietnam-era classics such as “Apocalypse Now” and “Full Metal Jacket”—and how “Warfare,” with its emphasis on firsthand experience, marks a departure from much of what came before. “That personal tinge to me seems to be characteristic of the age,” Cunningham says. “Part of the emotional appeal is, This happened, and I’m telling you. It’s not diaristic—but it is testimonial.”

Read, watch, and listen with the critics:

“Warfare” (2025)
“Apocalypse Now” (1979)
“Full Metal Jacket” (1987)
“Beau Travail” (1999)
“Saving Private Ryan” (1998)
“The Hurt Locker” (2008)
“Zero Dark Thirty” (2012)
“Barry” (2018–23)
“Mrs. Dalloway,” by Virginia Woolf
“In Flanders Fields,” by John McCrae

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Transcript

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0:00.0	This is Critics at Large, a podcast from The New Yorker.
0:09.3	I'm Alex Schwartz.
0:10.5	I'm Nomi Fry.
0:11.6	And I'm Vincent Cunningham.
0:13.0	Now, each week on this show, we make sense of what's happening in the culture right now and how we got here.
0:21.1	Over the weekend, the three of us, along the separate paths of our lives, all went to see
0:27.3	a new movie.
0:28.0	It's called Warfare.
0:30.4	It's made by Alex Garland, who directed movies like Ex Machina and last year's sort of journalism-focused civil war.
0:39.3	And his co-director on this film is Ray Mendoza, who himself served in Iraq as a U.S. Navy SEAL.
0:46.0	The film, which is based on the memories of Ray Mendoza and his colleagues, documents an actual mission of theirs that took place in 2006 in al-Qaeda-controlled Iraq. Red Man Zero-Aids is profane. We're seeing activity converging up to your north and south. This is Frogman Sixth, Romeo. We need to eat back on our last known position. We have severely wounded.
1:30.8	Who's a severely wounded? It's not you. Who is it? No, it's not you. Copy one word, podcast, too. You're coming to you or you coming to us? Alex, you saw this movie a while back. It really stuck with you. Why was that? Well, I think this is an excellent movie. I'm just going to say that right at the top, and I'm so curious to know what you both thought of it.
1:32.2	It has stuck with me for weeks.
1:42.4	One reason is, as you said, Vincent, it's based on the experiences that Ray Mendoza, who's the co-writer and co-director, it had in Ramadi in Iraq in 2006.
1:46.6	And it really tries to capture memory. It tries to capture as accurately as possible. And of course, that's something when we discuss memory that we have
1:51.2	to use a big asterisk for. But it tries to capture as accurately as possible what actually
1:55.5	happened to this group of Navy SEALs on this one particular day when everything that could
2:00.5	have gone wrong did go wrong.
2:02.6	You guys might be relieved to know as the resident hater of the group that I, in fact, very much
2:09.8	like this movie. Oh, interesting. Yeah. You know, part of it, I think, was the kind of like
2:14.7	choreography, kind of often wordless choreography. You know, there's like
2:20.7	actual soldiers who are then portrayed by these actors. And the way they move together as a kind of
	...

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