In November 2006, thirteen Navy SEALs were on an overwatch mission inside an Iraqi apartment building when an insurgent attack thrust them into a harrowing firefight that none of them would ever forget — except the one guy who can’t remember a thing.
Over the next 18 years, writer and director Ray Mendoza — who was one of the SEALs there that day — collected the overlapping and sometimes diverging memories of the men who were there and teamed up with “Civil War”director Alex Garland to co-write and co-direct “Warfare,”a film depicting the events of the fight exactly as they took place in real time.
Mendoza joined the Navy in 1997 and served for over 16 years as a member of SEAL Team 5 and as a Land Warfare Training Detachment and BUD/s instructor. He was introduced to filmmaking while performing in “Act of Valor”and went on to work as a military advisor on Peter Berg’s “Lone Survivor.” After working with Garland on the 2024 dystopian action thriller “Civil War,” the two decided to team up to tell the story Mendoza had been thinking about for nearly twenty years.
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Based on behind-the-scenes trailers and snippets of the film, “Warfare” seems hellbent on capturing the visceral nature of combat. Mendoza and Garland didn’t want to stylize or editorialize combat. They wanted to recreate it with precision, which meant “stripping out all tools that would be available normally in cinema,” Garland told Vanity Fair. That means no musical score, no character embellishment, no cutting to other timelines. Mendoza wanted to tell it exactly as it happened.
And for good reason.
Elliott Miller was one of the SEALs Mendoza served beside that day — and he has no memory whatsoever of what happened that day. The SEALs who were there have spent the two decades since telling him about it, but Mendoza wanted to take it further and visually recreate the mission, from the grenades to the gunfire exchanges to the moment Miller was injured, and the heroic actions of his brothers to help get him home.
To get it right, Mendoza sent his actors to a three-week bootcamp. Each one of them would be depicting real SEALs, including Mendoza (played by D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai from “Reservation Dogs”) and Miller (played by Cosmo Jarvis from “Shogun”).
“This will be one of the most important and poignant things we’ll ever do,” observed actor Will Poulter (“Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3”), a sentiment often shared by civilian actors who play military veterans.
“This is a traumatic experience in Ray’s life, probably one of the most,” Woon-A-Tai stated. “To have this guy who I’m playing behind that camera and watching my every move — and a lot of times, you could say, remembering the same moments that happened — it was a lot of pressure on me to get it right.”
It’s easy for Hollywood to get military stories wrong, to heighten them or to sacrifice authenticity for aesthetics or story. The cast behind “Warfare” is adamant that won’t be the case. “I have one opportunity to tell it right, to get it right, and to honor the people that were there,” affirmed Mendoza in a behind-the-scenes first look at the film.
The filmstars Poulter, Jarvis, Joseph Quinn (“Stranger Things”), Michael Gandolfini (“Daredevil: Born Again”), Kit Connor (“Hearstopper”), Charles Melton (“May December”), Finn Bennett (“True Detective”), Noah Centineo (“Black Adam”), Adain Bradley (“All American”), and more. Their three-week training camp was based on BUD/S — Basic Underwater Demolition SEAL — and included combat tactics, weapons handling, and communication and coordination during high-pressure situations.
The cast also got to work bulking up and getting in the kind of shape that would make a Navy SEAL proud.
Garland and Mendoza worked on making the sets 360-degrees of an Iraqi village. They made it so realistic that it brought back sensory memories for Mendoza. “[Some] scenes were definitely triggering — just a certain smell or a certain sound would pull on an emotional string,” Mendoza reflected. “It was definitely an emotional crusher for me at times.”
For veterans who have been wanting their stories depicted authentically onscreen, this film may feel like a long time coming.
“Warfare” opens in theaters nationwide on April 11, 2025.