Can Alex Garland & Ray Mendoza Remake the War Movie?

Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza’s Warfare takes that typically spurious tagline—“based on a true story”—as its measure of quality, re-creating over its trim 95-minute run time a failed US Navy SEALs operation in Ramadi, Iraq, in 2006. Eschewing the dramatic conventions of military movies about the War on Terror, Warfare sticks to a single incident, drawing from the memories of the US veterans (including Mendoza) who were on the ground in Ramadi at the time.