I recently caught a double feature at my local multiplex of high-style, high-tension thrillers about American soldiers under siege in claustrophobic locations. The stories told in Alex Garland’s Warfare & Ryan Coogler’s Sinners are separated by entire genres, decades, and oceans, and yet they both trap American soldiers in tight-space locales by surrounding them with enemy combatants, whittling down their ranks one corpse at a time. That shared Americans-under-siege dynamic puts them in unlikely conversation with each other as two feature films currently in wide release, but what really makes that conversation interesting is the films’ respective relationships with the cultural & historical context around their sieges. Warfare is so hostile to providing context that it borders on experimentation in narrative form, while Sinners is entirely about context, explaining its own supernatural siege’s relation to America’s past, present, and future. Together, they represent the two extremes of contextual explanation in cinematic storytelling, to the point where considering them together is something that would only occur to you if you happen to write movie reviews and catch them both at the same theatre in a single evening.
Assigning Warfare‘s authorship entirely to Alex Garland is a bit misleading, since he shares directorial credit with former U.S. Navy SEAL Ray Mendoza. In fact, the real-time, true-story siege thriller is most interesting for the battle between its two directors: one who wants to honor the soldiers depicted “for always answering the call” (Mendoza) and one who wants to examine them & pluck their limbs off like bugs he caught in a jar (Garland). An opening title card explains that the film’s reenactment of a failed 2006 American military mission during the Iraq War was made “using only the memories” of Mendoza’s platoon, who experienced the violent episode first-hand. After the reenactment concludes, surviving members of that platoon are shown visiting the film’s set mid-production to provide their insight, contextualizing the movie as an honorable commemoration of their service & sacrifice during the harshest conditions of war. Only, that final moment is undercut by inclusion of a portrait of the Iraqi family who were also present that day and whose home was invaded & destroyed to fit the American military’s needs & whims. Earlier, when the surviving American soldiers have safely escaped the real-time gunfight in rescue tanks, the camera then lingers on that family appearing puzzled & shellshocked in the rubble of their home, as if they were just invaded by space aliens and not fellow human beings.
Garland & Mendoza’s choice to reenact this one specific mission without explaining the larger context of the U.S. military’s invasion of Iraq (under false pretenses of seeking weapons of mass destruction) has been hotly debated as a disingenuous, amoral screenwriting choice among the film’s detractors. From the Iraqi family’s perspective, however, that absence of context only makes the unlawful intrusion even more terrifying & cruel. The family is sleeping in their cozy duplex when Americans kick down their doors and sledgehammer their walls in the middle of the night, inviting enemy fire into the home as a makeshift military base while they’re gathered to huddle on a single bed, powerless. There is no warning or preparation for this invasion, nor is their any communication once the fighting ceases. There’s no context whatsoever, neither for that family nor for the audience. All that’s offered is a dramatic reenactment of the gunfight from the surviving American soldiers’ perspective, with the flattering casting of young Hollywood hunks like Charles Melton, Will Poulter, Kit Connor, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai to help sweeten the deal for those who “answered the call.” The absence of testimony from the Iraqi citizens invaded, shot at, and displaced by those soldiers’ mission becomes glaring by the final credits, though, and the questions that absence raises hang heavy in the air. I like to think that unease was Garland’s main contribution to the picture but, without context, I can only guess.
The political & historical context behind the all-in-one-day siege plot of Sinners is much easier to parse, since Ryan Coogler is much more upfront about what he’s saying through his art. The director’s fifth feature film (all starring career-long collaborator Michael B. Jordan) and his first not adapted from either pre-existing IP or real-life events, Sinners is set in a 1930s Mississippi overrun with bloodsucking vampires. You wouldn’t guess the vampire part in its first hour, though, which is mostly a getting-the-gang-back-together drama about two former soldiers and current booze-runners (twins, both played by Jordan) who return to their hometown to set up a juke joint for Black patrons during Prohibition. After a long stretch of friendly “Look what the cat dragged in” reunions (featuring consistently dependable character actors like Delroy Lindo & Wunmi Mosaku), the juke joint proves to be a communal success, if not a financial one. Unfortunately, the party gets to be a little too lively, which attracts the attention of white, vampiric interlopers (led by the consistently intense Jack O’Connell). The vampires are particularly attracted to the transcendently beautiful blues music played by the juke joint’s youngest employee, Preacher Boy (newcomer Miles Caton), which introduces an unignorable cultural appropriation metaphor to the vampires’ violent desire to be let inside the party. More practically, it also sours the vibe of the evening by trapping the partygoers in a single location, waiting to be drained of their blood and assimilated into the vampire cult.
Sinners is a truly American horror story, a beer & blues-fueled gangsters vs ghouls battle set against endless fields of cotton and all the commodified evil they represent. Every detail of the story that isn’t character-based drama registers as commentary on American identity: the illusion of freedom, the fixation on money, the compulsory Christianity, the lingering infrastructures of slavery & The Klan. The only positive touchstones of American culture are, in fact, Black culture, as represented in a fish-fry dance party that offers a Mississippi farming community a few hours to cut loose before returning to a life of poverty & backbreaking labor . . . until the party attracts vampiric outsiders who want to claim that culture as their own. In one standout sequence, Coogler extrapolates on this idea to visually & aurally lay out how the Delta blues that Preacher Boy is playing in the juke joint is foundational for all fundamentally American music & pop culture, illustrating its connections to funk, rock, hip-hop, bounce, and beyond in a physical, impossible embodiment of the story’s context. It’s a moment that not only accomplishes everything Baz Lurhman’s Elvis picture failed to do across 150 extra minutes of runtime, but it also positions Sinners as one of the most distinctly American vampire stories ever told on screen (among which I suppose its closest competition is Katherine Bigelow’s Near Dark).
The only dramatic context Warfare provides before kicking off its real-time siege sequence is a brief moment where all soldiers involved are watching a pop music video on a shared laptop, laughing at its over-the-top sexuality & pelvic thrusts. There’s just enough time allowed to that scene for the audience to discern a few key soldiers’ personalities through body language & facial expressions, before they’re immediately shown breaking into and destroying a sleeping family’s home. In contrast, Sinners spends the first half of its 140min runtime getting to know the gangsters, players, and partiers it eventually puts under vampiric siege, so that they feel like real people instead of walking, talking metaphors. It’s through that sprawling attention to context that we learn that the booze-running twins who open the Mississippi juke joint were WWI soldiers before they became gangster contemporaries of Al Capone in Prohibition-era Chicago. Even after the siege story is officially over, Coogler can’t help but pile on more context about cultural vampires & the blues, dragging the setting into contemporary times with a surprise guest appearance by blues legend Buddy Guy. Normally, I would say less is more when it comes to a movie explaining its own themes & context, but Coogler overcommits to those explanations to the point of academic scholarship, while still managing to deliver a fun & sexy vampire movie in the process. Meanwhile, Warfare‘s deliberate aversion to context threatens to implode the entire project, with only a few stray shots of Americans viewed from an outsider’s perspective affording it any sense of artistic or political purpose.
-Brandon Ledet
Swampflix 