Pop Culture Happy Hour - Warfare

Episode Date: April 14, 2025

The new film Warfare dispenses with a lot of things you've come to expect from Hollywood war movies. It's based on the memories of a platoon of Navy SEALS, and attempts to capture the chaos of one specific Iraq War conflict as accurately as possible. The only thing Hollywood about it is its cast of young actors, including Joseph Quinn, Will Poulter, Kit Connor and D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai.Follow Pop Culture Happy Hour on Letterboxd at letterboxd.com/nprpopculture.See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

The new film Warfare dispenses with a lot of things you've come to expect from Hollywood War movies. It attempts to capture the chaos of one specific conflict during the Iraq War as accurately as possible and in real time. It's based on the memories of a platoon of Navy Seals. The only thing about this lean and brutal film that's remotely Hollywood is its cast of young actors, which includes Joseph Quinn, Wilter, Kit Connor, and DeFarro Wanatai. I'm Glenn Weldon, and we're talking about warfare on Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. today is NPR Culture Desk correspondent Netta Ulabi. Hey, Netta. Hey, Glenn. Welcome, welcome. Also with us is Vulture TV critic, Roxana Haddadi. Hey,

Roxanna. Hey, Glenn. Hey, hey, in the new film warfare, a platoon of Navy Seals gets trapped in an apartment while on a surveillance mission in Ramadi during the Iraq War in 2006. While they wait for rescue, the apartment gets attacked, and soldiers and civilians get grievously injured and killed. Sounds like the making of a solid war film, right? Something in the tradition of platoon, saving Private Ryan and Band of Brothers. Warfare is part of that Hollywood tradition, but it also represents a clean break from it. That's because the film isn't trying to dramatize a real event.

It's attempting to forensically reconstruct it. It's based on the memories of the seals who were there, including Ray Mendoza, who wrote and directed the film with Alex Scarland. He made Civil War and Ex Machina. Warfare is in theaters now. Roxanna, I know you to be a war movie person. Yeah. This one didn't hit for you.

Tell me why. No, it did not. You know, as I was listening to you talk about it and how un-Hollywood it is, I really just thought to myself, really? Like, it just feels like a phenomenon of marketing that we are talking about this film in these terms. Because to me, it really hits a lot of the exact same sort of beats as this genre has been doing for 20 years as it's tried to interrogate the Forever Wars. I didn't really find it that different from something like the output. post, which had Orlando Bloom and Scott Eastwood. Let's look at how intense and brutal this can be. And I guess for me, it was intense and brutal. Warfare does have really interesting sound design in

terms of how it shifts perspectives and shows like how are different members of this unit dealing with the impact of an IED, dealing with what should be sort of a customary mission gone very, very wrong, but I still felt like it did all of the stuff that I have become accustomed to these movies doing, in particular doing the thing where there are Iraqi characters who just are sort of there. And so I just, I don't know. I did not find it to be this phenomenal sort of break from tradition in the way that I think other people are talking about it. How about you, Neda?

You love war movies too. What about this? I do. I love good war movies. And I agree with Roxana. I found this movie very empty. You know, my husband, he served in the Marines for 10 years, and he and I went to the preview together, and we walked out saying to each other, who is this for? Who would want to watch this movie?

Somebody got to make a movie about the worst couple hours of their life. And it felt like a very gory vanity project to me. Hmm. Okay. I am not a student of this genre. I'm going to come out and say that. So here's what I noticed was different from what I was expecting. This film is notable to me for what it doesn't have. It doesn't have a score to manipulate your emotions.

I kept thinking of that moment in platoon where Willem Defoe dies to the Adagio for Strings by Samuel Barber. This ain't that. Sure. to explain everything too. It doesn't combine real people into composite characters. And there's nothing wrong with doing that. I want to be clear about that. But, because that's just done in other war movies to, you know, so the audience can focus on two to three people as opposed to 18. It also doesn't impose any kind of faky character arcs onto these soldiers. At no point, I was, I was relieved. At no point does any fresh-faced, blonde-haired, blue-eyed young recruit

pull out a picture of his girlfriend and say, this, here's Ellie Mae, and I'm going to propose to her when I get back to West Virginia and then get his head blown off. That doesn't happen. We also don't get characters who have obvious tells like, oh, that's the coward. That's the guy who's going to treat the locus poorly. They all treat the locus poorly. And I think, you know, these characters remain largely interchangeable, which is not capital D dramatic, but it did feel kind of capital R real because I think, you know, we always say intent doesn't matter here. I think for me, intent did matter here because this is coming from a different place. They don't want to tell the story of any one soldier. They want to show what happened to this unit. So the interchangeability to me was kind of a feature, not a bug. Did you guys feel that? I don't know. I mean, I felt it in that there are very specific moments that focus on like calling the shots in terms of how this unit like comes together. Like they line up in a row. They each search rooms interchangeably.

Some of them go up to the roof and some of them stay below. I totally understand the intention of that. But I also think this movie is cast with a series of. of internet boyfriends, right? I mean, it is cast with people who the audience will probably recognize one or more of them from other projects. So there is also this part of me that thinks, like, I understand that you wanted to recreate this awful moment, but you also cast all of these men with actors whom audiences will have a lot of fond feelings for already. And so I just feel like that necessarily sort of hampered the sense of,

We're all in this together and we're all equalized. I don't know. You're all being played by very attractive actors who the audience will probably like. So I don't, I don't know. I just. Very attractive British actors in many cases. Yeah. I feel very cynical about a lot of this, but I would love to hear what Netta thinks.

I will say that I commented on the unbelievably good-looking actors to my husband. And he said, you know, Netta, when you serve, they actually are pretty good-looking. Okay. But he and I were both really. excited to see DeFerro won a tie from reservation dogs. And I just left going, oh, really, this is the

best project you could find after that incredible show. He just didn't have much to do. None of them have that much to do. The dialogue isn't that good. They just sit there and they look panicked and they run around every so often. Glenn, I think all of your points are incredibly well taken, but I still

just didn't care. Yeah. Okay, that's interesting. Because like a lot of the things I'm not seeing in this film, two Roxana's point haven't been in films like this for like 20 years. Like nobody's been doing the adagio for strange stuff in war movies like this for a while there. But this film is based on memory. Memory imposes narrative, imposes cause and effect. We live in a chaotic world, but when we remember events, we remember them in the context of a story with a beginning, middle, and an end. We create gods. We create fate. We create narrative conventions. And this is based on memory. And so I, after the press screening that I saw of this, there was a Q&A with Mendez. Mendoza and Garland. Normally I bolt from Q&A's, but I stuck around for this one

because it was hosted by our friend, Chris Klimick. And I'm glad I did because Mendoza said something that kind of unlocked to this movie for me that I want to get your take on because he said that the Four Elliott dedication at the end of this film is very literal. His friend Elliot was one of the soldiers we see get injured in this film,

and that guy retains absolutely no memory of this event. So Mendoza wanted to reconstruct it for him. He and Garland interviewed every member of that platoon they could find and went through a process of culling through all these conflicting memories. So this is reconstructed. We talk about all the time how intent doesn't matter, but what matters here is accuracy to him. Accuracy is the goal here. Recapturing this chaos, recapturing this event, not shaping it, not clarifying it, not distilling it. Does that change your reaction to it in any way?

Isn't it shaping it and distilling it if all the memories are conflicting? But the film presents one version of the truth. I don't think that that conflict is built into the film at all. You know, Glenn, what you just said that the filmmaker said is so much more interesting to me that anything I actually saw on screen. Absolutely. And at the very end of the movie, you see just a couple of little snippets of the actual people on set. And you see them, you know, staging the battle scenes. And that, honestly, if they had made a movie about that, that would have been, I think, much more radical and experimental and interesting movie than the just kind of extended a battle scene that just went on for an hour and a half that we watched in which I didn't really learn anything about anyone.

And I didn't see anything that I hadn't seen before. Well, at this same Q&A, a woman stood up and said, my husband served in the Iraq war and he won't talk about what he experienced. And this film helps me understand what he went through. And Mendoza said, yeah, that's why I wanted to make this too, because Hollywood depictions get it wrong consistently. They glorify, they simplify, they propagandized. And I wanted to make this film so accurately, and, you know, to Roxanne's point is very well taken, what the hell does that mean? But so accurately that veterans can show it to the people who weren't there and say this is what it was like. where does that leave this film as a subject of critique?

Is it valid or interesting or even remotely worthwhile to point out that the film didn't do X if it wasn't trying to do X? Like the characters are interchangeable, but that's what the military is about, right? You don't want individuals in combat. You want people doing their damn jobs. And the fact that the dialogue wasn't particularly interesting or rose above the level of just perfunctory, this is what people would say in this instance. I don't know.

Is that only interesting to critics or do real people care about that? Because I come away from this film saying this was well executed, thank you for your service, period. I think my feeling is that perhaps veterans who served, to your point, will feel like this is an accurate depiction of what they lived through. my counterpoint to that would be we have existing documentaries like Restrepo and some other pieces of art that also capture that experience. So then the question becomes, for me, what is warfare doing differently? and I'm not sure again, for me, what it's doing differently technically or stylistically feels like it's adding to the conversation that we've had for 20 years now about the devastating impact of the Forever Wars. And I also really want to push back against the idea that it's not propaganda because I think every war film is propaganda of a certain kind. And I think that this movie has a lot of moments where, again, I was a little bit like, warfare is really bad, but you are inherently showing sort of a brotherhood that is gained by warfare that, again, is a very specific perspective that not everyone will share, but that the movie is pushing upon you as the status quo.

But I again, I'm really hesitant to say that this film does not editorialize or does not operate from a certain ideology because I think that it does. And so again, that makes it less unique for me because I think this genre just does this and this doesn't feel like a breakaway. You know, I think Roxana's point is exactly right. Like all war movies and perhaps all movies, it is a propaganda movie. But it is just one that, is so empty of politics. You can take whatever you, you can walk out of it. You can walk into it being anti-war. You'll walk out of it being anti-war. You can walk out of it being anti-war. You'll walk out of it being pro-war. It doesn't have anything to say, ultimately. And I think that's what it's our job to observe. I take your point. I take your point. I am fascinated by the way I'm giving this film in my head, a exception to my, it doesn't matter what you think you made. We tell you what you made because that's our job as the audience. That's our job as critics. But

I'm struck, you know, again and again in this film by, you know, the fact that when somebody is screaming on the floor for minutes and minutes at a time in agony, we don't need a score to tell us that's a bad thing because we get it because we have a human reaction to it. I will say, I have seen some reviews of this that call this film raw and nothing about this. And I think I think you guys would agree with me here. Nothing about this film feels raw. It feels constructive. Yes. Yeah. What it doesn't feel is, to me anyway, shaped into a conventional Hollywood shortcut way.

I feel like it's less a story being told than an event being reconstructed. And that is intentional. It may not be what a lot of people are going to a movie for. It feels like an experiment that is successful in its parameters that it sets for itself. But it raises more questions than it answers. And I think the filmmakers, again, it's me saying this. I can't believe I'm saying this. But I think their intention is for it to raise more questions.

And for you not to come away with anything. except war as hell, which isn't new. I'll grant you that. I think that that's where they're coming from, too. I also really think that that's, I would hope, sort of a baseline that a lot of people think. You think war is hell. But then you graft your own meaning and your own morality onto whether that war is worth it. And I guess at this point, like decades after these wars, I would want projects that are made about them to grapple, a little bit more with their legacy. And I think about something like Paul Schrader's The Card Counter, which does this in terms

of Abu Ghraib. We're getting all these reasons for why this film is unique. And I just think that sort of, especially within the conversation about this period in our history, I think I want something a little bit more that a simplistic war is bad read. I personally want more than that. And I think audiences deserve more than that, honestly. Well, this was an excellent movie to talk about, at least. Tell us what you think about warfare.

Find us on Facebook at facebook.com slash pch-h and on letterboxed at letterboxed.com slash NPR pop culture. We'll have a link in our episode description. That brings us to the end of our show. Netta Uluwobu, Roxana Haddadi. Thank you so much for being here. This was a great talk. Thank you, guys.

Thank you. What a pleasure. This episode was produced by Liz Metzker and edited by Jessica Ridi and Mike Katzif and Alokamin, Provin. our theme music. Thanks for listening to Pop Culture Happy Hour from NPR. I'm Glenn Weldon, and we'll see you all next time.