Alex Garland's Warfare shares queasy new behind-the-scenes look

Remember when the trailer for Alex Garland’s Civil War dropped and spawned a thousand questions about the origins of the “Western Forces” (a geographically and politically confusing alliance between California and Texas) and something called the “Florida Alliance”? The writer-director’s new film, Warfare, offers no such queries. While the titles may be similar, Warfare plays the stomach-churningly realistic counterpart to Civil War‘s dystopian fantasy. 

That’s because co-writer/co-director Ray Mendoza actually lived it. In a new first look clip from A24, Mendoza, who worked with Garland on Civil War, explains how he found the motivation to tell his own story about halfway through production on the former project. A former Navy Seal stationed in Iraq, Mendoza was part of a mission overwatching the movement of U.S. forces that ended in a shootout, injuring his friend Elliott Miller. “It’s just a love letter from Ray to Elliott,” Charles Melton, one of the film’s stars, says in the clip. Added Mendoza, “I have the one opportunity to tell it right, do it right, and to honor the people that were there.”