‘Warfare’ Review: Alex Garland Co-Directs (With an Iraq War Veteran) a Film That Purports to Show Us What War Is Really Like. But Has He Just Left Out the Story?

variety.com:

Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic War movies turn a lot of us into armchair warriors. We’ve seen the great ones, like “Saving Private Ryan” and “Full Metal Jacket” and “Apocalypse Now” and “The Hurt Locker” and “Platoon,” and every one of those films is so vivid and experiential that we may get swept up in the illusion that we now understand something essential about war.

But if you’ve ever been close to someone who’s been in a war, the first thing you know is that you know nothing about it. Literally nothing.

The chaos and terror, the spiritual and physical loyalty that soldiers feel toward each other, the unspeakable horror, the insane thrill of it — these are things that movies show us a mere shadow of, things that as civilians we can’t know.

There are filmmakers who fall prey to the illusion too. When “Apocalypse Now” was coming out, Francis Ford Coppola, caught up in the corrosive majesty of his vision, said at the movie’s Cannes Film Festival premiere in 1979, “My film is not a movie.