A traumatic Iraq War mission unfolds in real time

If a movie can be elegant and brutal at once, this one is

- STEPHANIE ZACHAREK

YOU DON’T NEED TO HAVE FOUGHT in a war to make a great war movie: though neither Steven Spielberg, Francis Ford Coppola, nor Stanley Kubrick did, the movies they made about the horrors of combat endure. But you could argue that the stakes are higher when a filmmaker who’s been to hell and back sets out to express the truth of his experience as, say, Sam Fuller did, using his own World War II diaries as the basis for his great, grim 1951 Korean War-set film The Steel Helmet. Members of the armed services who have seen combat and lived to tell about it often don’t tell about it. Which makes the accounts of those who do mean that much more.

Iraq War veteran Ray Mendoza has teamed with Civil War and Ex Machina director Alex Garland to make