When I settled into my plush theater seat to view Warfare on its opening weekend, I had done no research about the film. I anticipated the standard Global War on Terrorism fare: good guys and bad ones in an epic struggle watered down for the palates of Americans desperate for a denouement, and maybe a sappy love story for good measure.

I have never been so grateful to be disappointed, even as the film kept me pinned to my seat, alternating between terror and tears for 95 nerve-wracking minutes.

Directors Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland have taken an electron microscope to the GWOT, highlighting a single engagement between U.S. Navy SEALs and insurgents in Ramadi, Iraq, in November 2006. Somehow, what they produced seems, to this civilian reviewer, a highly precise translation of the gritty, intense combat that dozens of veterans of both Iraq and Afghanistan have described to me over more than a decade.

In the opening scene, the viewer enters the SEALs’ world as they cluster together in full kit in a small wood-paneled room to prepare for an engagement. The SEALs are not poring over maps or loading equipment, but gazing at a laptop screen playing the 2004 music video for Eric Prydz’s Call On Me. A lithe, sweaty California blonde in a thong leotard........

© Washington Examiner