---
title: "Warfare (2025) review"
description: "I went into Warfare knowing nothing about the context, which left me with one nagging question through the entire runtime: why the hell did Alex Garland - a..."
url: https://www.joekarlsson.com/reviews/warfare/
---

![A still from Warfare (2025)](https://www.joekarlsson.com/images/reviews/warfare/backdrop.webp)

# Warfare (2025)

Sep 29, 2025 | 2 min read | Rated 2.5 out of 5 | Dir. Ray Mendoza, Alex Garland

I went into Warfare knowing nothing about the context, which left me with one nagging question through the entire runtime: why the hell did Alex Garland - a British filmmaker - decide to make an American war epic?

The film tries to function as anti-war cinema by dwelling on the brutality and boredom of combat, but then it ends on this oddly triumphant note with the actual survivors appearing in the credits. I can’t shake the feeling that most American audiences will walk away thinking they just watched a badass war movie rather than a condemnation of it. The messaging feels muddled at best, which makes A24’s decision to distribute this even more baffling.

To be fair, the sound design is flashy and effective in all the right ways, and Joseph Quinn delivers a solid performance. I also genuinely appreciated the lack of context - no backstories, no defining characteristics beyond who’s screaming at any given moment. Just ranks, mustaches, guns, and blood to tell people apart. There’s something refreshingly un-cinematic about refusing to give the audience those typical character beats.

Hot Take: people obsessed with ‘realism’ have terrible taste, and if you love this film purely for its realism, you need to get out and see some actual cinema. This feels like the lowest common denominator war film - Zero Dark Thirty by way of hyper-realistic immersion, designed to make you project your own feelings about the Middle East onto a blank canvas.

Also, “Warfare” is a spectacularly generic title for a film that’s supposedly doing something different.

I’m sure this is extremely accurate to actual combat. I’m also tired of American war films, so maybe I’m just not the audience. But accuracy alone doesn’t make great cinema.

Also on [Letterboxd](https://letterboxd.com/joekarlsson/film/warfare/)

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