Iraq, 2006. The movie will star Ray Mendoza (Un-A-Thai), who served over 16 years as a SEAL team member, was awarded the Silver Star, participated in Operation Iraqi Freedom and co-founded War Office Producers.
This is a powerful, brave and honest movie. Garland co-directed it with Ray Mendoza, an ex-military man he met on the set of ‘Fall of an Empire’. Mendoza was acting as a consultant at the time, and was seen sharing a personal story with Garland – something that actually happened to him in Iraq in 2006.
It’s not an easy movie to recommend – but I wouldn’t want it to be overlooked. ‘Under Fire’ feels more like a chamber theater production than a classic military action movie. There’s almost no conventional plot here. The Marines take up a position in an apartment building, get trapped – and that’s it. What follows is a tense, exhausting wait, constant fear, fire from all sides. There’s no way out.
It’s the perfect anti-war movie. There’s a reason Garland calls ‘Go and See’ one of his favorite films – and it feels like it. The war here isn’t heroic, it isn’t pathos. It’s all noise, disorientation, fear and meaninglessness. You don’t understand where they’re shooting from, why, what to do. Just survive. Just stay alive.
It’s cool that Garland once again abandons the usual binary: as in ‘Fall of an Empire’, he doesn’t divide the sides into right and wrong. There are no villains here. Iraqis are barely shown – just silhouettes, shadows, flashes in the window. It is not the politics or the geography of the conflict that is important, but the state itself – fear, alienation, the feeling of being trapped.
It is worth mentioning sound separately – it is the protagonist here. The directors do not rely on visual delights, but on the feeling of presence. Watch only in a movie theater. The sniper’s heavy breathing, the clanking of shell casings, deafening shots, the screams of the wounded – it’s as if you were sitting next to the soldiers, catching every rustle.
It’s a hard, physically tangible movie. But I’m glad it exists.