Warfare (15, 95 mins)
Verdict: Sound, fury – and silence
One November night in 2006, a team of US Navy SEALs, on a reconnaissance mission ahead of a bigger force of American Marines arriving the next day, occupied a house in the Iraqi city of Ramadi.
Alex Garland’s enthralling film Warfare, unfolding in real time, tells the story of what happened in the ensuing 95 minutes. It is a picture not for the faint-hearted.
Credited as Garland’s co-writer and co-director in this project, Ray Mendoza is a former SEAL who, with the help of others who were there, ensures that it is a painstakingly accurate depiction of actual events. ‘This film uses only their memories,’ declares an opening caption.
Mendoza, the platoon’s communications officer, is played by D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, with Will Poulter as the young commanding officer and Cosmo Jarvis as the lead sniper, Elliott Miller, to whom the film is dedicated and whose sustained shrieks of agonising pain after suffering devastating leg injuries might well accompany you all the way home.
This is an all-American tale, yet rather satisfyingly it is mostly Brits – Garland, Poulter, Jarvis and other actors including Joseph Quinn and Finn Bennett – who tell it. They do so superbly.
Moreover, while Garland as a director has had significant success with sci-fi and dystopian thrillers (most notably, last year’s Civil War), there is no cinematic hellscape more affecting even than one rooted in present-day realism.
The message, hammered home at the end when we see the real participants alongside those who played them, is simple: this is the world in which we live.
But if war is sound and fury, Garland focuses mostly on the sound. For a long chunk of this film, the tension springs from near-silence. Unlike many lesser war movies, the crash, bang, wallop is preceded by an extended spell of hush as the platoon discreetly breaks into and commandeers the house, terrifying the two families who live there.
Alex Garland’s Warfare, unfolding in real time, tells the story of what happened after a team of US Navy SEALs on a reconnaissance mission occupied a house in the Iraqi city of Ramadi
Credited as Garland’s co-writer and co-director in this project, Ray Mendoza is a former SEAL who ensures that it is a painstakingly accurate depiction of actual events
This is an all-American tale, yet rather satisfyingly it is mostly Brits – Garland, Poulter (pictured), Jarvis and other actors including Joseph Quinn and Finn Bennett – who tell it
The low-key banter, the surveillance of the street outside, the gradual realisation that the jihadists have sussed out where they are and are preparing to attack, all passes as an almost unbearably suspenseful calm before the storm.
But when that storm does break, sound designer Glenn Freemantle (another Brit) comes into his own, using muffled noises and sudden silences as well as ear-piercing screams and the thunderous roars of air support to give an authentic documentary feel to what is, after all, still pretence.
Impressively, Garland keeps the tension cranked up even as all hell breaks loose.
The SEALs desperately need assistance, both to drive back their attackers and to evacuate the house without further casualties. But will it arrive in time, and in the right place? Eventually, all the military jargon used over the radio, all the careful coordinates, are supplanted by an unadorned cri de coeur. ‘Look for the blood and the smoke,’ says the commander, wearily. ‘We’re there.’
Garland, I suspect, chose a generic title for his picture because, for all its specific references to a deadly skirmish in Iraq, the raw fear we see, along with panic and pain, confusion and courage, are battlefield
perennials. Whether we’re watching Romans fighting Visigoths, or Ukrainians fighting Russians, it is and will forever be thus. Not many films convey that as viscerally as Warfare.
Like penguins, the film never takes flight
The Penguin Lessons (12A, 111 mins)
Verdict: Never takes flight
The Penguin Lessons, based on the memoir by Tom Michell, whisks us 30 years further back in time, to 1976. Tom (Steve Coogan, looking oddly ill-at-ease throughout) is a cynical, somewhat misanthropic teacher who takes up a post at an English-speaking boarding school in Buenos Aires, run by a snooty old-timer played by Jonathan Pryce.
One weekend, at a tango hall in Uruguay, Tom hooks up with a woman who takes pity on a penguin they find on the beach, covered in oil. Against his better judgment, they take it back to his hotel. It is a one-night stand with long-term consequences.
By morning the woman has scarpered, leaving Tom saddled with the cleaned-up penguin. Despite strenuous attempts to get rid of the bird, he cannot shake it off, and ends up smuggling it back across the River Plate to Argentina, where it becomes not just his companion at the school, but even a teaching aide.
All this sounds sweet enough, but the film’s strained whimsy (flagged, inevitably, by a relentlessly jaunty soundtrack) pretty quickly begins to grate. The spectacle of a grown-up talking solemnly to a penguin is charming once, but by the third or fourth time, not so much.
Tom (Steve Coogan, looking oddly ill-at-ease throughout) is a cynical, somewhat misanthropic teacher who takes up a post at an English-speaking boarding school in Buenos Aires
Tom hooks up with a woman who takes pity on a penguin they find on the beach, covered in oil. Against his better judgment, they take it back to his hotel
Even less forgivable are the cack-handed efforts to entwine a so-called ‘feelgood comedy’ with the grim realities of Argentina’s brutal political regime.
The director is Peter (The Full Monty) Cattaneo, who made a much better job of dramatising real events in Military Wives (2019), while the writer is Jeff Pope, whose many credits include the delightful Stan & Ollie (2018). He also teamed up with Coogan to write the excellent Philomena (2013). Both apart and together, they have a classy pedigree, which, disappointingly, The Penguin Lessons does nothing to enhance.
Rather like the dear little bird itself, the film never takes flight.
A peculiar tale of bloodsucking bluesmen
Sinners (15, 137 mins)
Verdict: Will suck you in
Ryan Coogler’s period drama Sinners is set in an African-American community in Mississippi in 1932, and has all the ingredients you would expect of that time and place: sharecroppers, wooden churches, blues music, moonshine, chain gangs, the Ku Klux Klan … and vampires.
Well, maybe you wouldn’t expect vampires. But the Black Panther director Coogler evidently decided that there wasn’t enough originality in his tale of a pair of gangster twins – not Ronnie and Reggie but Smoke and Stack (both played by Michael B Jordan) – returning to their home town after making their ill-gotten fortune in Chicago working for Al Capone. So he added a bloodsucker played with a swaggering relish by Jack O’Connell, who leads an ever-expanding posse of the undead.
All this is as peculiar as it sounds, and at times I yearned for the story this might have been without the supernatural element. Yet it is done with tremendous verve, and presents with admirable conviction its unsettling underlying premise: that music inspires evil as well as joy.
Ryan Coogler’s period drama Sinners is set in an African-American community in Mississippi in 1932 where Michael B Jordan plays a pair of gangster twins
It is done with tremendous verve, and presents with admirable conviction its unsettling underlying premise: that music inspires evil as well as joy
Hailee Steinfeld also stars, although the really eye-catching performance is that of newcomer Miles Caton, as the guitar-playing son of a preacher man.
He looms large in one truly memorable scene when a blues party elides into a celebration of music from many eras, many countries. That spectacle alone is worth the price of a ticket.
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