I find most war movies a bit trite and overly sentimental. Sometimes, war has a higher purpose than mere coercion, but I'd consider those occasions rare. Whenever you come away from a war movie feeling uplifted, I'd submit that you have been sold a product. To me, the story is the bonding of men facing death, the shared suffering and sacrifice endured when we ask men barely (and maybe not) out of their teens to take incredible risks and responsibility. I've always held "Black Hawk Down" to be the gold standard because it hit the sociology of an infantry unit pitch-perfect and hammers home the fact that young men take these risks and pay this price, now and in the future, for each other, not to make the world safe for democracy or any other slogan the political class uses to sanitize what is at once both the most brutal and transcendent of human activities. Former Navy SEAL and one of the main characters in this film, Ray Mendoza, and English screenwriter and director Alex Garland team up to turn Mendoza's autobiographical script into a masterpiece of what wars do to the young men we send to fight them. //

This is not a war movie; it is a movie about men at war. If you think anything militarily significant happened here, the ending will disabuse you of that notion. The short documentary segment after the fade-to-black for the movie really ties everything together.

"Warfare" is minimalist, but the emotions it conjures up are raw, and you feel them as much as you watch them. Go see it. It is a great film, and we need to support smaller indie studios, such as Angel Studios, if we want to change what movies look like.