Is A24’s ‘Warfare’ based on a true story? The answer is complicated

War is hell — and Warfare does its damnedest to honor that old maxim.

When he began working on Warfare, Alex Garland, the acclaimed writer and director behind movies like Ex Machina and Annihilation, told Entertainment Weekly he sought to make an “ultra-realistic, forensically accurate movie about combat.” To do that, he linked up with an Iraq War veteran, Ray Mendoza, a technical military advisor around Hollywood who worked with Garland on last year’s Civil War.

The result of their union is, per EW’s critic, “a remarkable cinematic achievement operating at a profoundly compelling level. It’s also an incredibly unpleasant affair, and when it was over, it left me thinking, ‘Well, what the hell was that all about?'”

Many would say the answer to that question is intertwined with the film’s source material, the Iraq War’s Battle of Ramadi, which raged for eight months in 2006.

So, if you’re curious, Warfare is based on real events, but the director is nevertheless hesitant to call it a “true story.” How come? Read on as we unpack the real-life inspiration for the film.

What is Warfare about?

Warfare is not a plot-heavy film. Set on a single day in November 2006, the 95-minute feature is a real-time account of Navy SEALs engaging in a firefight with al-Qaeda insurgents in the Iraqi city of Ramadi.

“The story is so simple that it is practically abstract,” said EW’s critic. “[The SEALS] requisition a private house (a polite term for barging in and shoving the civilians in a back bedroom before drilling the walls), then use the position to surveil a nearby marketplace. Men with guns start to congregate. Any minute now, things are going to go south. It’s agonizing to watch because you know bloodshed is right around the corner. Yet when it finally comes, it still takes you by surprise.”

The film is anchored by an ensemble of rising actors, including D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai, Charles Melton, Joseph Quinn, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, Noah Centineo, and others.

Is Warfare based on a true story?

Warfare is based on real events, but Garland himself is reluctant to call the film itself a “true story.” He told EW, “If we’d said ‘a true story,’ that would be slightly disingenuous.”

Why is that? Because Garland’s depiction of this conflict isn’t born from an established timeline or journalistic sources. Rather, it comes from, among others, the memories of co-director Mendoza, who was among the soldiers there that day.

“When I first sat down, conceptualized this, discussed it with Ray, I was imagining we would, in a strange way, recreate reality. What one quickly realizes is that you can’t,” Garland explained. In lieu of an established timeline, the Civil War filmmaker realized that “what we did have was memory — we had Ray’s memory, and we had the memories of other people involved in this incident.”

When you see the film, it tells you up front: “This film uses only their memories.”

The pair relied on more than just Mendoza’s memory, speaking with every member of the platoon they could to establish their own agreed-upon timeline. That wasn’t always easy. “[Sometimes] those memories would clash with each other,” said Garland. “Someone would say, ‘I did this,’ and someone else would say, in effect, ‘No, I did that.’ And then we’d have to figure out what the truth was as best we could.”

What was the Battle of Ramadi?

It’s important to note up front that an understanding of the Iraq War or the Battle of Ramadi isn’t a prerequisite for digesting Warfare, which works to be an of-the-moment, hyper-realistic depiction of the chaos of battle.

If you’re curious, though, the Battle of Ramabi took place between March and November of 2006, and Warfare is set at the tail end of the conflict. In the al-Anbar Province of Iraq during the war, the 8-month battle found American and British troops fighting with militia fighters from several different insurgent groups for control of the city.

In an interview with Military.com, Mendoza said the events depicted in Warfare were “part of the counterinsurgency mission,” and involved “taking back sectors of Ramadi and establishing footholds.”

He continued, “We would go in as an overwatch element the night before, and we would provide overwatch as they set up a combat outpost… The insurgency would try to prevent the combat engineers from setting that up. And so we just cover them really until they set up concertina wire, sandbag windows and whatnot. That’s one footprint. And then out of that, we punch out further into a certain sector, so on and so forth.”

The events of the film could have happened anywhere in the city, per the interview, which adds that “Mendoza’s sector that day hadn’t seen an American presence for months.” Soldiers setting up a base in an Iraqi home, as we see in Warfare, is reportedly common during missions such as these.

The co-director added, “It was a sector we felt we needed to take back. So moving into this operation on that day, there’s multiple units involved for this huge clearance operation, there’s a big sweep and we were covering the back end.”

Are Warfare‘s characters based on real people?

They are, though the majority of the real-life soldiers saw their names changed for a variety of reasons.

One soldier whose name remains unchanged is Mendoza, who’s portrayed in the film by Reservation Dogs actor Woon-A-Tai. Another is Elliott Miller, the unit’s medic and head sniper, played by Shōgun breakout Cosmo Jarvis.

“The story is not solely about me. I was one of the guys there, and some of it is being told from my perspective initially, but one of the guys named Elliot got severely wounded upon extraction,” Mendoza explained to EW.

“He’s had some [traumatic brain injury] issues and extremely bad damage to his extremities,” the co-director continued. “He’s in a wheelchair and he doesn’t recall what happened. We’ve tried to write it out for him in literary form, but even that’s really confusing. I think he understood what happened, but for us who were there and remember it, we have visual memories of it. He’s lacking that, and I’ve always wanted to do that for him. I felt it would be easier for him to watch something than to read 12 individuals’ differing perspectives on it.”

“This project is bigger than us. The story’s bigger than us,” said star Charles Melton, who plays one of the unit’s commanding soldiers. “There’s all these great things — great studio, great filmmakers, great script, this and that — but at the end of the day, it was for Ray, for Elliott.”

This real-life connection made the film as emotional to shoot as it was exhausting. “[It] was a form of therapy for me in a lot of ways,” Mendoza told EW. “There’s things that I had pushed down and tucked away. I just didn’t have the tools to deal with that.”

The real-life Elliott, who was also on set during filming, reacted similarly. “Elliott started to cry, and then I had to go off set because I didn’t want the actors to see me crying,” said Mendoza. “So I called cut, ran off set, and I cried for a good 10 minutes. And at that point, Alex had to take over the rest of the day.” 

Mendoza also spoke with EW about the experience of showing the finished film to Miller and the other SEAL Team members there that day. “[I was] nervous about what the guys would think because their approval and opinion is what matters the most to me… Elliott said he liked it, but [he] doesn’t remember what happened, so I think it was comforting for him to hear from all the other guys that it was about as accurate as we can get it because the film is about as complete of a memory he is going to have, and I think he was extremely grateful for that.”

Where can I watch Warfare?

Warfare is currently playing in theaters.

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