Co-directed by Alex Garland (Ex Machina, Civil War) and Ray Mendoza — a Navy SEAL veteran who participated in the actual operation depicted — Warfare is one of the most rigorously authentic war films ever committed to screen. The film recreates, in real time and with almost documentary precision, a harrowing November 2006 mission by SEAL Team 3's Echo Platoon in Ramadi, Iraq. There is no score, no title cards, no moralizing voiceover — only the suffocating, chaotic reality of men holding a position under ambush while waiting for evacuation that may never come.

The ensemble cast — D'Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, Cosmo Jarvis, Michael Gandolfini, Charles Melton, and Evan Peters — was assembled with a deliberate ethos of collective anonymity; no single character dominates, mirroring the unit cohesion that defines special operations culture. Mendoza worked directly with the surviving members of Echo Platoon to reconstruct the events, and several veterans consulted on set throughout production to ensure every tactical detail, every radio call, every moment of crisis reflected what actually happened.

Released by A24, Warfare landed as a landmark of modern war cinema — praised for its moral restraint, visceral immediacy, and refusal to mythologize or condemn. By stripping away every conventional war-film device, Garland and Mendoza created something closer to a memorial than a movie: an act of witness that forces the viewer to sit inside an experience rather than observe it safely from the outside. It stands as one of the defining American films of the decade.