War on Film – Warfare

Many films which depict combat in a realistic way – with intense battle sequences and soldiers incurring horrific wounds – are inevitably described as being ‘anti-war’. This has been said of Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan, with its memorable opening sequence involving men struggling ashore on Omaha Beach during D-Day. More recently, Ridley Scott’s 2023 film about Napoleon or Edward Berger’s 2022 adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front have similarly been described as ‘anti-war’ in their message. Warfare, the new film written and directed by Alex Garland and Ray Mendoza, may well be lumped into the same category. And on one level, Warfare is firmly anti-war i