As I noted earlier, Alex Garland’s work gives me mixed feelings yet here I am back again watching his latest. He does share directorial credit here with Ray Mendoza who helped advise Garland in the making of Civil War and more importantly was a participant in the real-life battle that this film is based on. The result is a stunningly authentic recreation of the incident and probably the single best portrayal of what modern urban warfare is like on film. True, it has no wider ambitions and says nothing about why the US is even in Iraq, but it doesn’t need to as what it does is perfectly fine and even much needed. The question is, why didn’t Garland aspire to this level of realism in his earlier film?

Under the cover of night, part of a Navy SEAL platoon occupies a house in Ramadi. They set themselves up on the upper floor and direct their Iraqi army interpreters to secure the downstairs with the local family who actually live there. When dawn arrives, they use the position to observe the streets outside. Many hours pass and it becomes evident that their presence has been noted. Their interpreters warn them that the militants have broadcast a call to Jihad and other elements report increased enemy activity, leading their air support to move away. The tension mounts until suddenly a grenade is thrown through the hole in the wall they made for their sniper, Elliot, injuring him. They call for a Bradley IFV to evacuate him and blindly exchange gunfire with the attackers. Acting professionally, they wait for the IFV, then blow claymores and exit the house to the IFV under the cover of smoke. Just then, a large IED explodes right next to the armored carrier, catching almost everyone.

There’s no exposition to tell us what the team’s mission is nor are there any backstories about any of the soldiers there. All we get are the events as they occur and what we hear from their communications. The military jargon was an issue for my wife as you’re expected to at least be cognizant enough to understand that CASEVAC means a casualty evacuation, what a Bradley even is or that a blood check means checking for injuries. They do explicitly spell out some terms that most people probably won’t know, such that MAM is short for military-age male, and I learned from here that when their own soldiers are too close to enemy positions for airstrikes to be safe, their air support can still buzz the ground as a display of intimidation. This film is full of detail about how the US military operates and that’s so very satisfying to watch. The soldiers are professional and seem to scrupulously act in accordance with their training and established procedures. The Iraqis are nervous about being ordered out of the door first but that doesn’t seem to be an act of deliberate cruelty. Similarly it’s callous of the Americans to just seize someone’s house and put them at risk but keeping them sequestered in a room is reasonably safe under the circumstances.

Many action movies try to show the characters do something obviously stupid and get punished for it. I love how this film does the opposite. Everything is done by the book and they take all reasonable precautions, but that doesn’t preclude them from being surprised by unexpected developments. It also shows that combat deployments are long stretches of boredom as the soldiers are on watch without anything happening, punctuated by moments of pure chaos. In actual combat, we can see for ourselves that direct gunfire is not effective as most of the time the enemies are so far away they are barely visible anyway. It’s necessary to suppress the enemy but is unlikely to cause casualties as combatants know to take cover. Instead it’s the grenade and the IED that are truly dangerous. Being caught in an explosion is no joke as even if they’re not directly injured, they can be so concussed as to be combat ineffective. The real advantages of the US military are on full display: the real-time updates they get on the battlespace, their air support and their ability to call up reinforcing elements near instantly. Yet the odds against them are still daunting as they are surrounded inside a densely populated hostile environment in which the militants can blend into the civilian population.

For me, this film delivers on what it sets out to do: to show audiences what modern warfare is truly like. It’s the perfect corrective to the usual action movie in which gunfire is exchanged at implausibly close ranges and unrealistic accuracy, vehicles fly up into the air when hit by any sort of explosion and the characters have ridiculous kill counts. I will note that even this portrayal is already outdated. The ongoing war in Ukraine has conclusively demonstrated the effectiveness of drones, resulting in an even more complex and larger battlespace in which small arms are even more obsolete. It would be amazing if more filmmakers would realize that fight scenes would feel more dangerous and full of tension if they aimed for better realism.