Co-directed with former soldier Ray Mendoza, Garland’s brutally accurate account of a US special forces mission gone wrong is viscerally immersive, but unaware of a point or a meaning beyond the horror

There’s a brutally efficient energy to this war movie recreating with 4K digital clarity a real incident involving US special forces on a chaotically failed mission in Iraq in 2006, co-directed by Alex Garland and former US Navy Seal Ray Mendoza; the latter was a military consultant on Garland’s previous film Civil War, and reconstructed the events from his own memories and those of his comrades. It is a visceral, immersive, often skull-splittingly loud film; real-time action with a found-footage aesthetic, featuring opaque technical dialogue and eerily ice-cold quiet moments seen from the aerial reconnaissance computer screen, with murmuring detached voices audible.

Warfare really does show the punishing boredom of a soldier’s life. But it is weirdly obtuse and self-congratulatory, the shock of its ending softened by some bizarrely misjudged material over the closing credits, showing pictures of the actors next to their real-life counterparts and even showing home-movie type footage of these soldiers now beamingly hugging the stars. It’s as if Garland and Mendoza finally felt the need to pull out to reveal the bigger picture, and found only a reality TV show.