The movie, Warfare, in theaters April 11, is a movie by a veteran made for veterans.
Ray Mendoza, a former Navy SEAL who served in the Iraq War, teamed up with Oscar-nominated screenwriter Alex Garland to direct a movie about a 2006 mission that goes wrong, to honor his friend and colleague who was gravely injured back then and has no memory of the operation.
The filmmakers hope the movie will resonate with not only all kinds of war veterans, but also civilians, who will get a view into what modern warfare is actually like. Mendoza says the film aims to be “the most accurate depiction of combat to date.”
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Here’s a look at the real events and people that inspired the script and the film’s key takeaways for veterans and civilians.
The real story behind Warfare
The movie is based on a real mission in an al-Qaeda-controlled area of Iraq’s Ramadi Province in Nov. 2006. A group of American Navy SEALs were tasked with surveilling an urban residential area to make sure ground troops could pass through safely the next day. Troops unknowingly entered an apartment building next to insurgents, and al-Qaeda forces hurled a grenade through a sniper hole, injuring one of the SEALs, Elliott Miller (Cosmo Jarvis). When his fellow troops tried to evacuate him and another wounded SEAL, an IED (improvised explosive device) exploded, and Miller suffered life-threatening injuries.
Miller survived, but he did not remember anything about that mission. Mendoza says that over the years, Miller would email his fellow service members with questions about the moment. Mendoza decided to make Warfare to help fill in the gaps in his comrade’s memory.
When he retired from the Navy, Mendoza worked as a Hollywood stunt man who helped actors pull off realistic gunfights in action movies. While working on the 2024 movie Civil War, he became friends with Garland, and he shared the story of Miller’s evacuation.
Garland saw the makings of a movie and recorded Mendoza’s recollections of the Ramadi operation. Together, they conducted interviews with former members of the Navy SEAL team on that mission, and Miller even visited the set. They wanted to recreate the timeline of events as they occurred in real life and not invent characters, or embellish details for dramatic effect.
Making Warfare
Filming took place outside of London at a World War II airfield that’s now a TV and film studio. The actors were put through boot camp, literally, the training that Navy SEALs do to prepare for the stress and fatigue of the war zone.
Stars featured in the film include Charles Melton, Michael Gandolfini, Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, and Kit Connor. The actors became so close with one another that they gave each other nicknames, as military service members often do. Jarvis was known as “Booger Boo,” Miller’s actual nickname from his military days.
Actors had to wear about 50 pounds of tactical gear during shoots, carry each other for two miles on stretchers and master radio etiquette, weapons handling, and military terminology.
The movie doesn’t have a soundtrack. Viewers are ambushed with the sounds of the battlefield and men screaming in pain, but there is one song. The only cheerful scene in the movie is the first scene of the movie when soldiers are gathered around laughing and dancing to a music video for techno artist Eric Prydz’s “Call on Me,” featuring young women doing aerobics in a sexually suggestive manner.
In real life, the men would watch this video before every mission. It became an inside joke. At one point, they’re all standing in formation in the dark and then one makes a thrusting gesture towards another one, and everyone tries not to crack up.
Within minutes, the men go from dancing to applying first aid to one another. Disembodied limbs are seen out in the middle of the street, and the film’s soundtrack basically becomes one of wounded men screaming, designed to immerse viewers in the fog of war. It feels like it takes forever for rescuers to show up because they have to make sure they don’t drive over IEDs. When a voice over a radio asks “where are you guys?” a soldier responds, “Look for the blood and the smoke, we’re there.”
A conversation-starter
Most of the dialogue in Warfare is military jargon. When asked in a video-chat why the jargon wasn’t translated into phrases civilians could understand, Mendoza said simply, “I didn’t make it for them.”
He reiterated that the movie was dedicated to Miller, so he wanted the dialogue to be as his comrades remembered it. And he argues that civilians who play the video game Call of Duty may recognize some of the military terminology and that viewers don’t have to have a degree in astrophysics to enjoy science fiction films.
Plus, many military personnel get back home and find civilian conversations go over their heads. Mendoza hopes the film will spark discussion, explaining, “I wanted to make something veterans could use as a stepping off point, maybe for conversations that they wouldn't otherwise be able to have.”
Joe Hildebrand, one of the real Navy SEALs injured in the botched Ramadi operation, says that after nearly a decade spent internalizing feelings about that day, working on the film was cathartic, explaining, “I don’t think any of us really started to heal until this movie.”
Mendoza hopes lawmakers will watch the film and better understand what it means to send troops into battle. As he puts it, “If you do decide to go to war, then as a society, we need to take care of our troops when they come back.”