Full of the sound and the fury... but not much else

Alex Garland’s ‘Warfare’ gives a bleak look at war with little context, and ‘The Penguin Lessons’ asks: can Steve Coogan and a penguin stand up to fascism?

- Words: Clarisse Loughrey

Alex Garland has now constructed what could be called his trilogy of violence: the relentless, patriarchal assault in horror Men (2022), the total collapse of American society in Civil War (2024) and, now, the immediate aftermath of an IED explosion in Warfare. There’s little to no context to be offered in these films. The point, entirely, is what’s felt in the moment – the fear, the pain, the blood. Garland’s approach is understandable but limited. Warfare, at least, is the most successful of the three because its myopia is a crucial part of its structure.

While filming Civil War, Garland was introduced to Iraq war veteran Ray Mendoza, who’d been hired to make sure the film’s gunfight sequences looked as realistic as possible. In November 2006, Mendoza had been part of a team of Navy Seals who, alongside two Iraqi scouts and two marines, were left cornered in a residential home in Ramadi province after the detonation of an IED resulted in multiple deaths and life-threatening injuries.

He and Garland began work on a screenplay that painstakingly reconstructed his memories and those of his comrades in order to create what he termed a “living document” for Elliott Miller, one of the men injured, who has no recollection of the incident. As its credits insist, the film aims for “as much accuracy as memory allows”. It is a work of attempted neutrality, co-directed by both Garland and Mendoza. There’s no musical score to manipulate its audience’s emotions; no sympathetic backstories for any of its characters.

Instead,