Warfare, the latest pseudo-blockbuster from A24, speaks a whole lot of nothing despite its ear-piercing explosions and gunshots. It’s directed by Civil War and Ex Machina’s Alex Garland, in collaboration with Ray Mendoza, an ex-Navy seal and Hollywood military advisor. This unlikely pairing have put out a project brimming with intense action and pulsating emotion, but their work has left audiences scratching their heads as to who their film is for – and what it’s even really about.

The most immediate problem raised by my experience watching Warfare was the conflict between its internal and external methods of depicting the War on Terror. The film itself actually offers a pretty nuanced take on the affairs in the Middle East, depicting Arab characters who are clearly impacted by the invasive American soldiers. There’s even a moment involving an Iraqi family at the end of the film where you might begin to wonder if Warfare is truly making an insightful commentary on the futility of American involvement in the region. This is subsequently followed, however, by a Band of Brothers-esque highlight reel that compares portraits of real-life American veterans with the fashionable Hollywood actors that portrayed them on screen, which felt unashamedly imperialistic, and effectively unravelled any of the thematic work done in the film itself.

None of this is to mention the film’s mind-boggling advertising campaign, which has seen its ensemble cast of Hollywood’s most popular heartthrobs  – namely Kit Connor, Joseph Quinn and Will Poulter – appearing in a variety of major publications and unabashedly acting quite gay with one another. One headline in Entertainment Tonight reads: “Why the Warfare cast got a matching tattoo – and how Will Pouter got the nickname ‘Daddy’”. Mind you, Will Poulter spends most of the film’s runtime reduced to a crumbling heap after witnessing the violent deaths of his officers. The correlation between performative queerness and the horrors of war in the Middle East remains unknown to me, but perhaps I’m the one missing something. You’d truly think that this group of men was promoting some kind of new-age Boogie Nights sequel, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

On a technical level, the film is thoroughly impressive; a masterclass in tension and terror. This is all well and good right until you remember that Alex Garland released Civil War less than a year ago, which combines all the best parts of Warfare with a more compelling narrative and a marginally better moral throughline. I am just struggling to understand why Garland would feel compelled to release an inferior version of Civil War before its release year is through – I don’t think some people even realise that the two films are different entities. It’s all just quite inexplicable, and feels like a psychological experiment on the limits of audiences and whether or not they will consume identical pieces of media. It worked on me, I guess.

While Warfare admittedly excels in the sound and editing departments, the other aspects of the film don’t help to counteract the impression of quality that you’re getting from this review thus far. Its script is overflowing with military jargon to such an extent that it is quite literally impossible to comprehend what characters are saying for most of the film’s runtime – and I understand that Warfare is an experiment into realism – but at a certain point, a director has to recognise when their creative vision is quite literally interfering with an audience’s capacity to comprehend their work. It’s so easy to tune out of the film and reduce the endless barrage of commands to background noise, because it’s not like you’d glean any information from the codified dialogue if you were actually listening, either.

There’s also a noticeable problem with the film’s casting, wherein recognisably talented performers – Joseph Quinn and Will Poulter – are paired with Netflix alum Kit Connor, who unfortunately pales in comparison to the rest of the ensemble. May December’s breakout star, Charles Melton, is also woefully underused here; the actor has about ten minutes of screen time at the end of the film that thoroughly wastes his potential. Warfare is literally Melton’s first credit since May December, and it boggles the mind that his agent thought this would be a slam dunk of a follow-up.

It doesn’t feel quite right that I’ve written this review about a film depicting gut-wrenching violence and civil disorder mostly focused on the gayness of its cast and my inability to understand radio commands, but it seems like this is the way Warfare wants to be consumed. Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, to their credit, made a pretty serviceable attempt at depicting the impact of America’s time in Iraq, with all its fallacies and tragedies, but the external forces surrounding the film have turned it into this strange Hollywood entity, rather than a serious cautionary tale. For proper war films with thematically appropriate advertising campaigns, see 2023’s All Quiet on the Western Front, or even Masters of the Air, an Apple TV+ mini series from last year. Or, just completely ignore the periphery information surrounding Warfare. To each their own, I suppose.