Opinion: Indie war propaganda is still war propaganda

“America will bomb your country until there’s nothing left, then come back 20 years later and make a movie about how sad their soldiers got from doing it” – Frankie Boyle

Since it premiered a couple of weeks ago, Warfare, the latest movie from indie darling studio A24, has been continuously heralded as a searing anti-war film. A “scrupulously realistic” meditation on the horrors of combat. A visceral masterpiece committed to “total, unfiltered authenticity“. Critics can’t stop raving about its raw intensity. Rotten Tomatoes’ ‘Critics Consensus’ reads: “Narratively cut to the bone and geared up with superb filmmaking craft, Warfare evokes the primal terror of combat with unnerving power.” Yet beneath all the talk of craft and authenticity lies something simpler, uglier, and more familiar – something very American: another war movie where the invaders cry on screen, and the invaded barely get a face.

Based on the memories of co-director and former US Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza, Warfare follows a squad of American special ops soldiers on a surveillance mission that descends into chaos after they storm a civilian home in Iraq. A home belonging to an Iraqi family who the movie remains unconcerned with throughout its 95-minute runtime. As bullets fly, walls explode, and people die, the emotional centre of gravity never shifts from the American soldiers. Iraqis, whose country was decimated by a manufactured war, are not people but furniture. Maybe not even that – at least furniture gets seen. They’re shadows in their own homes.

If you’re a movie buff from the Global South, this shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise. Warfare is the latest in a long line of American films that repackage occupation and invasion as aestheticised trauma. It’s a timeworn script. Many of Hollywood’s biggest war films over the last few decades have been defined by their dedication to centring American soldiers, dehumanising their victims, and obfuscating imperial political opportunism. But when this emotional architecture is filtered through the lens of a production coming from an independent studio like A24, it flatters otherwise “sceptical” viewers into thinking they’re engaging with something complex, morally serious, and apolitical. 

In Warfare, the footage is grainy, the camerawork kinetic. There’s no music, no exposition, no clean morality. After its testosterone-fuelled opening scene, the film is, at its core, a long Call of Duty mission. It is raw and cinematically brilliant. But beyond the elevated aesthetics, stellar sound design, and A24 logo slapped on the front, it’s still trademark Hollywood – a film that centres the invaders as the victims of their own invasion, without commenting on, much less critiquing, the war machine they serve.

We’ve seen this sleight of hand before. In fact, Hollywood has a long tradition of working alongside the US government to repackage war propaganda as art, weaponising tone, aesthetics, and narrative framing to obscure imperial violence, distort history, and seduce viewers. Oscar-winning “masterpieces” like Zero Dark Thirty and American Sniper are just two of the countless movies that make up the Military-Entertainment Complex – projects made in direct collaboration with the CIA and the US Department of Defence. According to declassified documents, the Pentagon has influenced over 2,500 film and television projects, often framing them as “gritty” or “realistic” accounts of military life.

While Warfare’s co-directors Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza reportedly refused to collaborate with the Pentagon – Garland avoided using American military equipment, opting for British tanks – they could’ve saved themselves the trouble because their film still marches to the beat of American exceptionalism. Iraqis barely get speaking roles in Warfare. We’re never offered flashbacks to the lives of the Iraqi family before Mendoza’s Navy SEALs storm their home and turn it into a base of operations. They are never granted subjectivity or agency – just collateral damage on the path to their occupiers’ psychological breakdowns. Human scenery for the invaders’ trauma. 

There’s nothing about the nature of the occupation. No drone strikes. No Abu Ghraib. No war crimes. No context. Iraq is just another dusty, depopulated set-piece for the catharsis of its destroyers. By the film’s end, the family’s home is left bloodstained and shattered, their lives destroyed. They should be the emotional centre of the story. Instead, they are treated like background noise. The people who suffer most are relegated to the margins.

Still, you might be tempted to argue that the point of Warfare is precisely to centre the soldiers, many of whom, after all, were kids trapped by America’s poverty draft. It’s an American film about Americans, made by Americans, for Americans. It’s not supposed to educate audiences about the Iraq War, but to show the psychological conflict can have on people. Garland himself echoed this in an interview with Dazed, saying: “Personally, I have an expectation that most adults already know something about the Iraq War, and don’t need a whole set of explanations about it. They arrive with some knowledge of the world they live in.” But that’s precisely the problem – most Americans don’t know shit about the Iraq War.

Between 2003 and 2023, at least 200,000 Iraqi civilians were killed as a consequence of the US-led invasion of their country, with various estimates suggesting the true figure likely exceeds half a million. By 2008, the UNHCR estimated 4.7 million Iraqis had been displaced, with two million forced to flee abroad. Between 2003 and 2006, half of Iraq’s registered doctors fled their country. By 2007, 70 per cent of Iraqis had no access to clean drinking water. All of this devastation was a result of fabricated claims of WMDs that the US and UK governments already knew did not exist, paving the way for the rapid privatisation of Iraq’s resources by American corporations.

Meanwhile, a 2007 Associated Press poll found that half of Americans believed fewer than 10,000 Iraqis had died – a staggering underestimation of even the most conservative estimates. In 2008, a Pew Research Center survey revealed that only 28% of Americans could correctly estimate the number of US military fatalities in Iraq, let alone Iraqi ones. According to a 2006 Roper poll conducted for National Geographic, only 37% of Americans aged 18 to 24 could locate Iraq on a map. This is the “knowledge” American adults arrive with – a black hole fed by decades of chest-thumping, flag-waving, bald-eagle Hollywood storytelling.

This is why there needs to be an active responsibility on filmmakers and storytellers to engage with empire, politics, realities, and context when telling stories about war. This doesn’t mean you can’t tell stories that centre on the morality of invading soldiers, either. Plenty of successful films have already done that. But merely depicting the brutality of war without taking a position, without engaging with how those bearing the brunt of a brutal invasion suffered, does little beyond aestheticising trauma while putting the invader and invaded on level moral fields, much less telling a meaningful anti-war story.

So, when A24’s indie reputation, Warfare‘s “horrors of war” framing, Garland and Mendoza’s apparent refusal to co-produce the film with the Pentagon, and powerful performances from heartthrobs like Joseph Quinn, Will Poulter, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai all come together, the result is that Warfare disarms the very audiences who might otherwise be sceptical of big-budget war propaganda. Because Warfare is raw, serious, and reckons with the trauma of war, the liberal viewer, the film bro, the Letterboxd critic, and the disillusioned millennial who rolled their eyes at American Sniper all let their guards down. When imperialism looks this artful, this complex, you’re expected to think it couldn’t possibly be propaganda. But it is.

A24 has billed Warfare as a “visceral, boots-on-the-ground story of modern warfare” told “in real time and based on the memory of the people who lived it.” Memories of who? Not the millions of civilians whose lives were ravaged by a war waged to serve empire, neoliberalism, and corporations. Those of us from the Global South – from countries borne out of colonialism, empire, and imperialism – owe it to ourselves to ask the important questions. Not: what did this war do to them? But: what did it do to us? And why are we never the ones allowed to answer?