"Warfare" Delivers Just What the Title Says
Ray Mendoza says if we shudder at the fright and noise, "That would be awesome."
With thanks to IndieWire's Ryan Lattanzio for the assignment and edit– and please go to IndieWire for more and updated coverage of the buzzed-about film– I spoke with the former SEAL, the co-writer and co-director, who lived it.
FILMMAKER INTERVIEW
Ray Mendoza Believes the Ultra-Realistic ‘Warfare’ Won’t Trigger PTSD for Veterans: ‘The Truth Is Actually More Liberating for Us’
Mendoza tells IndieWire how he and co-director Alex Garland stuck without exception to an utterly accurate recounting of a November 2006 battle in Iraq.BY FRED SCHRUERS APRIL 10, 2025 11:00 AM
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Ray Mendoza, co-writer and co-director of “Warfare” with Alex Garland, presents as a serious-minded, if cordial conversationalist. The veteran, who served over 16 years as a Member of SEAL Team 5, won a Silver Star Medal for the very combat shown in daunting forensic verisimilitude in this film — and he’s worked through degrees of trauma most civilians can only imagine. But he’s got a covert humor to him as well, and when asked if the sheer volume and assaultive relentlessness of the film’s sound mix might send certain filmgoers shakily fleeing out of the theater, his response is quick: “That would be awesome.”
As the film and Mendoza’s entire career make plain, he’s not a man for half-measures, and you see he was not just kidding as he explains what the sound mix does to replicate a warfighter’s lived reality: “I think what a lot of military personnel relate to is when you’re in a position of that kind of vulnerability, your senses are really, really heightened, your switch is on, right? You have to be ready. You’re listening for every abnormal sound: Is that people talking next door? Is it that one dog that barks at random things? Everything just seems really loud,” he told IndieWire.
For some viewers, given the steady tension and the blood-soaked moments of confusion and screams that make the adjective “visceral” only too real, the film, now headed to IMAX screens and opening everywhere Friday, is a challenging watch. The early critical response has hovered north of the 90th percentile in favorability, though some reviewers argue the filmmakers have gone too narrow-focus on sheer authenticity, not to say shock value.
The take-it-or-leave-it dare may be no surprise to those who have followed Garland’s proclivity for avoiding the cinematic okey-dokes as he searches for broader societal meanings, including a dark view of cultish tourism (“The Beach”), the psychological limbo of existing as one’s own avatar (“Ex Machina”), the sheer horrorscape of “28 Days Later,” and the damage done by a collapse of democracy that no longer seems wholly fictional (“Civil War,” a surprise hit a year ago).
“Civil War,” on which Mendoza served as military supervisor, bore messages of how grievance can turn to nation-wrecking political chaos. But the film insisted on a certain neutrality, a purposeful absence of judgments and lessons. It was a view of dystopia as seen from scalded sensibilities, a feeling that truly invaded the screen with the revelation of Jesse Plemons’ uncredited appearance as a racist nationalist keeper of obscure oaths.
That film’s box office more than doubled its $50 million cost, and if the climactic special forces-style assault on the White House provided more unnerving excitement than resolution, the work on that sequence and throughout shooting formed a bond between Garland and Mendoza that energized them to mutually craft “Warfare’s” scalding authenticity. Garland handed the character work of directing to Mendoza to honor the project’s one abiding rule: sticking without exception to an utterly accurate recounting. The directors hew to a fiction-free account of the often-breathless events of “Warfare’s” long night into day in Iraq in the November 2006 action that would be part of what war histories call the Battle of Ramadi.
Garland shared the duo’s resolute ethic while appearing at a Los Angeles panel alongside Mendoza (and D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai, who portrays Mendoza with a convincing stoicism that arose from his inquiries into the concerted memories of the SEAL’s battle mates). “This film [with a five-week shooting schedule] cost $13.5 million dollars. If it cost $50 million, we wouldn’t have been able to make it in the way we made it with a pure reliance on memory,” Garland said.
What both men agreed to eliminate, in the search for a “forensic account” of the group’s claustrophobic state of siege, was “the other stuff, the backstories.” Garland characterized these as typical foxhole movie chatter, such as, “One of these guys, their girlfriend just split up with him.”
Asked of his motivations that same evening, Mendoza said he’d hoped the accuracy would be therapeutic in resolving his own trauma, “Because it’s something that I pushed down and created multiple shells around it — pretty much impenetrable…and it got to the point where I kind of hit a bottom where — you know, I have a daughter — and at some point I [said], ‘I need to get out of this.’”
In IndieWire’s interview some days after the film began corralling positive reviews and the kind of viral online following that A24 has made its promotional strategy, Mendoza dug a bit deeper: “I can tell you why I am glad. I think people in the beginning were worried that this would be triggering for PTSD, but I think [for his cadre who lived through and revisited the day], it’ll be the opposite. The honesty and the truth is actually more liberating for us.”
In “Warfare,” Mendoza also tells the long-neglected but unforgettable story of his best service friend Elliott Miller (Cosmo Jarvis), who was so gruesomely wounded by an IED that, at first, the sight “froze me in my tracks.” Then came the hellish moments of dragging the torn-up sniper out of the bullet-swarmed street, and staunching his wounds as best he could. Mendoza’s resolute bravery was praised in the formal citation by the Navy that awarded him a Silver Star for valor. (The award has generally gone unmentioned, certainly by Mendoza.) In the course of being patched up and rescued, said Mendoza, “Elliott flatlined two times.”
The mission began in fairly standard form: The SEALs infiltrated a bleak and dusty corner of Ramadi that happened to overlook a marketplace and, unbeknownst to them, also sat across from the lair of the Iraqi insurgents. The Iraqis soon grew aware of the SEALs’ presence in a commandeered apartment building, then started marshaling a deadly assault.
As lead communicator for his group in the three-“element” mission as part of Task Unit Ramadi, the Ray we watch is an ad hoc guide to the action. His radio calls and requests for air support and for the armored vehicles that would come to evacuate the wounded — and, ultimately, the unit — make us lean into what the lingo may mean. A smart further directorial stratagem is to incorporate the grainy gray-and-white surveillance footage — often bearing as-it-was communications and commands — so the audience can pursue a kind of desperate logic amid what must have been sheer madness.
Even as sitting across from Mendoza may make you feel he’s the most been-there-done-that person you’ve ever met, he keeps his humor at hand. Some levity was useful for their collaboration (in which Mendoza’s interviewswith his fellow vets became the points of emphasis). The actors endured a robust boot camp-like experience, bonding thoroughly as they then rehearsed 12 main sequences they’d enact. The film opens in bravura style as, true to what Mendoza and his buds in SEAL Team 5 would do as a mission spooled up: They stand in a gaggle, hopping and shouting as one, while watching their go-to superstitious-ritual banger, the slamming music video for 2004’s “Call on Me” by Swedish DJ and producer Eric Prydz.he structure of the film prior to its (literally) more explosive moments brings revelations that Mendoza and Garland unfold by degrees. After the song, we’re in an empty Ramadi street for a few moments before the men we will see in such extremis come snaking into frame, hugging the walls and hunting a hiding spot. The unfortunate local family who will be their unwilling hosts are treated throughout with a kind of rough-hewn dignity, isolated deep in the home, and we then settle in uneasily as the array of much-touted young actors who will play the several key roles parcel out clues to how they will meet the day’s rigors.
In service to the restrictions Garland has compared to stripped-down Dogme 95 film craft, Mendoza said, “We didn’t have to create anything because it’s all based off memories. It’s quiet because that’s what happened, we were sitting there for that period of time. It wasn’t like a creative decision —`Oh, I have a good idea, let’s make it quiet at the beginning.’ It’s just what it was.”
As a SEAL, Mendoza operated as a very cool hand and leader under fire — to all but himself, it seems: “I don’t remember how I was. I felt I was in some psychedelic — I was in and out. Things were appearing, disappearing. One minute, I was here; next minute, I wasn’t here.”
Reading between the lines, you can feel Mendoza’s quiet pride in fulfilling the trust that helped the group embrace savage memories as a re-committed cohort: “It’s like somebody who’s been misrepresented as part of any group, right? You start making movies or telling stories about a group feeling invisible or misunderstood, and, hopefully you can say, finally, someone’s paying attention. Someone really understands this. And I can use that as a way to describe what I was feeling, or what I went through.”
“Warfare” opens Friday, April 11 from A24.
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