Warfare is doing very well with audiences and critics, though it can’t match the box-office numbers of Civil War (2024), the previous collaboration between Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza. And A Minecraft Movie still rules the cineplex.
I found Warfare enraging. Before I explain why, I should note that “the war film” is my least favorite genre. Occasionally great war films get made, but they tend to be unique and ambitious films such as Fires on the Plain (Japan, 1959), The Battle of Algiers (Italy and Algeria, 1966), and Come and See (USSR, 1985). America also makes a good war film here and there, such as, Apocalypse Now (1979), Glory (1989), and the brilliant D-Day sequence in Steven Spielberg’s otherwise heinous Saving Private Ryan (1998), which stole some of its most harrowing effects from Come and See.
But the American war film tendency is to follow certain jingoistic genre formulae, even while feigning great seriousness. There’s the building-of-company-cohesion narrative, taking soldiers from all regions, backgrounds, races, ethnicities, religious practices and putting away their differences as they learn to be a fighting unit. There’s no “I” in team, though technically there is one in “melting pot”!
This narrative, which really got set in stone in WWII combat films, often overlaps with the fake antiwar film formula. The phony antiwar film actually makes war seem like a cool adventure with exciting action sequences, but there are periodic scary battles and gory casualties followed by laments about how terrible war is. The phony antiwar film is hilariously pilloried in Tropic Thunder (2008), in which Ben Stiller and Robert Downey Jr play two actors trying to outdo each other in hammy sobbing over Stiller’s gruesome fake injuries, which make his handless arms look like two exploded vegetable stalks.
War films in general use the thrill of violence, all the shooting and explosions, to create a great excuse for male…
Auteur: Eileen Jones
