Prime Video has just added an extremely tense war action thriller movie

June 17, 20254 Mins Read

The real-time war film is based on true events.

Prime Video has just added Warfare to its service, the extremely tense and harrowing action war thriller from director Alex Garland (Annihilation, Civil War).

Garland co-wrote and co-directed the movie alongside Ray Mendoza, a former US Navy SEAL turned military technical advisor on Hollywood projects.

The film is based on Mendoza’s own experiences in the Iraq War.

Taking place mostly in real-time, it depicts how a surveillance mission undertaken by him and his platoon in the city of Ramadi in 2006 went disastrously wrong.

“Warfare embeds audiences with a platoon of American Navy SEALs in the home of an Iraqi family, overwatching the movement of US forces through insurgent territory,” the plot synopsis from A24 reads.

“A visceral, boots-on-the-ground story of modern warfare, told like never before: in real time and based on the memory of the people who lived it.”

Warfare boasts a large ensemble cast of young stars.

These include Charles Melton (May December), Cosmo Jarvis (Shōgun), Joseph Quinn (Stranger Things), Kit Connor (Heartstopper), Michael Gandolfini (The Many Saints of Newark), Noah Centineo (Black Adam), Will Poulter (The Revenant), as well as D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai (Reservation Dogs) as Mendoza himself.

Warfare earned very positive reviews from critics and currently holds a 93% audience and critics score on Rotten Tomatoes.

In particular, it was praised for stripping away the artificiality typical of Hollywood war movies. This is in favour of trying to accurately depict what happens when real young soldiers (stunningly and believably portrayed by the entire cast) are suddenly thrust into combat.

Some took issue with the film for not more directly interrogating why US soldiers were in Iraq in the first place, accusing it of being a piece of military propaganda.

However, I’d argue that Garland and Mendoza, to their credit, go out of their way to make the scenes of warfare look so dangerous and horrifying. This is so that it would be hard for a viewer to come away from the movie feeling like it’s something they’d want to experience first-hand, even if the film ends with a tribute to the real-life soldiers.

You can read a sample of some of the rave reviews for Warfare below:

The Atlantic: “What if you stripped away all the hooky plotting typical of military dramas, and just put an unembellished skirmish from a real war on-screen? Would it still work as cinema? The answer is yes.”

BBC: “Together, Garland’s virtuosity and Mendoza’s first-hand experience create a masterful technical achievement that is, more importantly, emotionally harrowing.”

Chicago Tribune: “Warfare’s mission, should audiences choose to accept it, is 95 minutes of tension and occasional release without conventional catharsis or hooyah triumphalism.”

The New Yorker: “Certainly, it is hard to come away from Warfare, with its soldiers’ screams still ringing in your ears, and see the American military’s presence in Iraq as anything but a violent, misguided intrusion.”

Time: “If a movie can be elegant and brutal at once, this one is.”

Vulture: “The filmmakers do achieve what feels like genuine authenticity in their depictions of combat, both when it comes to direct engagements and the long, uncertain periods of standing around and waiting between such engagements.”