It’s not that I don’t understand the movie, but what I don’t get is that what are they trying to convey with it.

Minor spoilers for actual events.

Warfare is a 2025 movie about a squad of US Navy SEALs taking over a house in Iraq and defending it while trying to evacuate wounded soldiers. On paper, this is fine. We are following a squad of soldiers in a harrowing situation, where they are surrounded by an unknown number of local militia. This is based on real events from 2006, so US had been present in Iraq for years at that point (the war lasted from 2003 to 2011).

Of course, it is better to have an honest movie about these situations then just pure army propaganda, but at the same time, this does feel like army propaganda.

The movie begins with the squad choosing a house in town and then they just take over that house. There’s no explanation on why they are there. They just take it over and keep the two families living in it as prisoners. And then they just sit there, looking through a hole in the wall they assumedly made themselves. They have a sniper keeping an eye on a specific building where local militia starts to gather.

But why did they gather there? Because they knew the Americans were in this specific house. So, to recap, our “heroes” went to a house, took the two families in it as prisoners, and caused a battle by their pure presence, the reasons for which are never explained to us. What am I suppsoed to be getting out of this? On top of this, they have a translator and another Iraqi man with them. They are just completely disposable and die early on.

Also, while our “heroes” are outnumbered, it is very hard to see them as any kind of underdogs in this situation as they clearly outgun their enemies. They have air support, they can just call in tanks and they have superior communications, whereas their enemy is just militia.

They also do what they call a “show of power” multiple times. This means that a fighter jet flies low over the road in front of the house, raising a lot of dust into the air and causing the ground to tremble. Does this work? At this point the US had been in the country for three years. The Iraqis know what the “show of power” is about: The SEALs are feeling vulnerable or they want cover. We know that the Iraqi, or any other group fighting an asymmetric war, is going to learn during the process, so they must know how to react to those situations by that point, so either the “show of power” signals to them that they should keep pushing or that something is about to happen.

Throughout the movie, I’m just thinking that I’m supposed to be rooting for these people, who are just fucking up the lives of the locals. Sure, they are just servicemen and don’t really have any power over the situation, but I’m still going to side with the innocent families in the house or the people who are trying to protect their town from a foreign invader, both being groups the movie barely acknowledges the existence of. Sure, the Americans might have been there to overthrow Hussein, but that had happened early on in the war and the discussion around weapons of mass destruction had already subsided as complete lies, so these people were basically just there to be assholes.

In the end credits, we see the actors and the servicemen they are playing side by side, but many of the servicemen chose to keep their faces obscured. This could be for security reasons, if they are still in the service in some role, or maybe they realized none of this was actually worth it and wanted to distance themselves from these events. One can only hope.