'Warfare' Dares To Ask...What If War Was Real?
#315: "Warfare," "The Amateur," "Wargames," "Talk To Me"
Edition 315:
Hey movie lovers!
This week: We’re getting visceral! A true-life war movie followed by a really fake-y one in theaters, a 40-year-old one that came true this year and a horror movie that I pray never comes true. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” horror master Ari Aster is taking on the culture wars.
Warefare
Think about how much movie violence you’ve watched in your lifetime. You’ve probably seen thousands of people get shot, stabbed or blown up in various movies and shows. And if you’re like me, very few of those really bother you. You can shrug it off — it’s not real!
That’s impossible to do with Warfare, a recreation exercise as much as a movie. Veteran action filmmaker Alex Garland held the hand of co-director Ray Mendoza as they crafted a movie 100% written through the memories of Mendoza and his fellow Navy SEALs on one perilous mission in Iraq in the mid-2000s.
That means every line of dialogue, every action, and every bullet wound you’re seeing as a hellish ambush traps and endangers the soldiers is real.
It’s enough to jack your anxiety sky-high, especially when the SEALs are played by a half-dozen of Hollywood’s hunkiest rising stars — Will Poulter (“The Bear”), Joseph Quinn (“Stranger Things”), Cosmo Jarvis (“Shogun”), Noah Centineo (To All The Boys I’ve Loved Before), Michael Gandolfini (Many Saints of Newark), Charles Melton (May December). The cast makes it easy to love the characters, and once the bullets start flying, none of them have Hollywood plot armor, so you worry for all their safety.
That total commitment to reality is why the movie works — even though it necessarily limits the movie from crafting a story or developing characters in the way. The soldiers go in, they get attacked, they take losses, they pull out. It’s not a victorious or even heroic mission.
We stay with the unit the entire time, with no exposition, context or cutaways to TV coverage of the war. There’s no spin put on the story, no pro- or anti-war shading, no political messaging. That’s put a lot of viewers on their back foot.
It’s basically saying here’s what war really looks like — what do YOU think?
Err…well…I think I never want to go myself! Thank you very much to those who do.
From a filmmaking standpoint, Garland is separating himself from all other directors in how he captures intense combat scenes. He stays tight to the action and really makes you feel it (in both last year’s Civil War and this one the sound effects are LOUD), showing the chaos and intensity while managing to maintain a clarity for a viewer in what’s going on and where. I was never confused, yet after the movie I was exhausted.
Movies like this also serve as a snapshot of a class of young actors (go back and look at that cast list for Black Hawk Down…stacked), who get to put the War Movie notch on their belt that every actor must do once.
If any of them come out looking destined for stardom, it’s not Poulter or Jarvis (the presumptive favorites), it’s Melton. He admittedly has the part in the movie that’s the most star-ready, but his presence is undeniable. (As for most interesting/best actor, I’m still riding with Quinn. He’s got something special.)
The only thing left to do is stick a wet finger in the air and see which direction the wind is blowing for A24, the indie darling that has been trying to scale up its productions commercially while maintaining its artistic integrity. And so far, much to my surprise, they’ve done both well! And the result has been…losing money. I shudder to think how much longer it can continue this way.
Something New
The Amateur (Theaters): I had to check and then double and triple check to make sure this wasn’t an Apple movie. Because it looks and feels exactly like my common complaint about Apple — that it’s a bunch of famous people in cool locations playing dress-up. Everyone in it feels like they know they’re in a movie, rather than real life.
Not that I’m asking for some crazy verisimilitude in a spy thriller, but I guess I just never really bought Rami Malek as a CIA coder who suddenly turns into Jason Bourne to track down his wife’s killers. Laurence Fishburne’s wise-cracking mentor is very on-the-nose, as is Rachel Brosnahan’s manic pixie dream girl, Jon Bernthal’s jock field agent and Holt McCallany’s no nonsense CIA suit. These are in fact version of roles every single one of these actors have played before!
There is of course such a high baseline for movies like this. If I get someone type-type-typing on a futuristic laptop opening confidential files, or holding a finger to an earpiece while being chased by bad guys, or see several very creative methods for killing the aforementioned nameless, faceless bad guys…then I’m going to enjoy it.
That’s basically what the movie is counting on. It’s packing a bunch of people doing things you’ve seen them do before, in a well-worn genre, with a story you’ve seen before. If you like all those component parts, it’s enough to give a soft thumbs up!
Something Old
Wargames (1983, Amazon Prime): Forty years ago, it was quite the lark to imagine a kid (Matthew Broderick…PRE-Ferris Bueller) could accidentally hack into the defense department’s nuclear missile system from his home computer thinking it was a video game. It’s enough of a premise for a compelling yet lighthearted little thriller. And nothing says 1980s more than a teenage Ally Sheedy as the love interest.
At least he worked for it! Nowadays the people with the missles just straight up invite you to their group chats.
Something To Stream
Talk To Me (Netflix): This newsletter definitely under-indexes on horror movies. We don’t talk about them much, mostly because I don’t watch a lot of them and most of my friends don’t either. But more and more I’ve come to respect movies that can surprise me and make me feel something. Few things do that more than a good horror movie, and this one from 2023 is very good.
Horror is one of the genres I grade on a binary scale. Is it scary? Then it’s good. And this movie has no less than a half dozen moments that made me watch through my fingers or close my eyes all together.
It’s a classic horror premise — a group of friends find the embalmed hand of a psychic and figure out if they give it a handshake, they can talk to dead spirits. But the added layer, in which one of the girls becomes obsessed with the hand to communicate with her dead mother, signals the movie’s ambition to be “prestige horror.” It very nearly reaches it.
Trailer Watch: Eddington
Back in 2023, I caped up for Ari Aster’s movie Beau Is Afraid, which was absolutely insane but so ambitious that I loved the attempt. Perhaps more than any other director, his movies feel unfiltered, unpredictable, and maybe even a little dangerous? In other words, ALIVE. That’s why I can’t wait to see what he does taking on a pandemic-type event and the online conspiracy mongering surrounding it.
Joaquin Phoenix stars for him once again, and this time the cast is filled out with Pedro Pascal, Emma Stone, and Austin Butler. What a cast! Can’t wait for this one.