- Starring
- D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Cosmo Jarvis
- Directors
- Alex Garland & Ray Mendoza
- Rating
- R
- Genre
- Action, Drama, War, Docudrama
- Release date
- April 11, 2025
In Warfare (2025), a U.S. Navy SEAL platoon is deployed to Ramadi, Iraq, in November 2006 for a surveillance mission. Stationed in an Iraqi family’s home to monitor insurgent activity, the team, led by Captain Erik, is ambushed when insurgents next door launch a sudden attack with grenades and gunfire. The story unfolds in real-time, depicting the SEALs’ desperate fight for survival, their efforts to evacuate under relentless enemy fire, and the heavy toll of casualties and injuries they endure.
James Carrick
James Carrick is a passionate film enthusiast with a degree in theater and philosophy. James approaches dramatic criticism from a philosophic foundation grounded in aesthetics and ethics, offering insight and analysis that reveals layers of cinematic narrative with a touch of irreverence and a dash of snark.
4 comments
IMDBTQS2IA
April 19, 2025 at 11:54 pm
I thought overall it was a good movie. There were no woke elements or political commentary. It focuses more on realism than telling a story or developing characters, it can be difficult to watch at times but I enjoyed the faithful reenactment.
Savin LeDaal
May 18, 2025 at 2:22 pm
Reality based combat story. If you want to have a good idea what real combat is like without over the top Hollywood drama this is a good one
Poita
June 23, 2025 at 12:16 am
It’s mostly based. But maybe it’s my overly sensitive woke-o-meter cooking over time but I did detect some subtle wokery.
Navy seal squad leader Erik, gets shell shocked by the initial grenade attack even though he’s not in the room. From then on he is checked out and not leading and complains about having his bell rung. Then after the IED attack he’s more shell shocked but not injured and after his own forces bomb the street as they hunker down in the house, he gets even worse and is fully checked out.
They cast Will Poulter in the role and although he’s a great actor with potential, he’s usually cast because he has a comical dumb@ass doofus expression permanently fixed on his face.
So they made the first white squad leader look weak.
Then they had the coms subordinate step up and take natural command and he’s ethnic. I don’t know if this conforms to the actual racial makeup of the squad as the end scene showing the real soldiers has their faces blurred.
Then they had the heavy gunner look fat and lost but in the end credits squad pics, you cans see he isn’t fat and pudgy as the actor playing him is.
The squad that links up with them half way through the movie is led by an ethnic who looks to be of native American descent.
Then there is another white squad 2 member who just steps on a badly injured team members leg and then one that starts hard patting him on his horrific wound and telling him it’s a paper cut.
So there are no white squad members who come out looking great in this movie and the two heroes are ethnics. When Navy Seals are predominantly white according to research I did.
This all might be the actual makeup of the squad but that doesn’t mean it’s not woke. The reason being that I’ve seen several movies now that are getting more sophisticated in the way the imbue the story and cast with DEI and woke ideas. They are not as overt any more. So for example, with this movie it could be that among all the dramatic and heroic real life squad action stories, the film makers search for a story where the ones who stepped up to save the day were two ethnic squad members and the whites were either injured and screaming in agony for the entire movie, doofuses, or shell shocked and weak looking.
I don’t know how much artistic licences was taken to frame things this way, or if they just trawled the many stories to find a naturally DEI centric one, or if none of that was factored in.
But considering that Director Garland’s last movie, ‘Civil War’ seemed to take delight in showing the winning side which executed the president as being a bit ‘Sandinista’ in flavour with the Hispanic journalist sneering as the President dies, and the redneck murderer played by Jesse Plemons, I would lean towards ‘not’ giving Garland the benefit of the doubt.
Having said all that, I’m open to the idea that I’m wrong on this.
Richard_Cranium
September 4, 2025 at 8:23 pm
Ok! Love war movies. I could never have gone through what these guys went through but I also would have preferred to not watch a movie about it either. Good action scenes but the in-between was so boring. Pass unless you have time to kill.