Warfare (2025) — Read, Study & Download the Screenplay
A real-time combat film about memory, procedure, fear, and the collapse of control.
The Warfare screenplay follows a Navy SEAL platoon and attached Marines during a sniper-support mission in Ramadi, Iraq, as a carefully controlled occupation of a house turns into a catastrophic ambush. Ray Mendoza and Alex Garland’s script avoids the usual war-movie architecture of backstory, speeches, and heroic framing. Instead, it builds tension through layout, silence, surveillance, radio calls, small tactical decisions, and the horrifying speed with which a routine extraction becomes chaos.
For writers, this screenplay is essential study material for real-time structure, procedural realism, spatial suspense, ensemble action, sensory writing, and the challenge of dramatizing combat without turning trauma into spectacle.
Ready to get to work? Check out the Study Notes just below. When you're ready, download the Warfare screenplay.
Warfare Study Notes
What writers and film students can learn from this screenplay
Warfare is useful to study because it strips combat drama down to procedure, geography, memory, and consequence. The screenplay begins with OP-1 entering a house in Ramadi under night vision, then spends careful time mapping the building: kitchen, hall, balcony, sniper room, family bedroom, metal gate, driveway, courtyard, and surrounding rooftops. That spatial clarity is not decorative. It becomes the story’s nervous system. When the attack begins, every doorway, curtain, wall, radio call, stairwell, and patch of smoke matters because the audience has already been taught how the trap is built.
Craft Focus
- Real-time tension: The script does not rely on traditional backstory beats. It builds suspense through waiting, watching, radio procedure, routine checks, and the gradual feeling that the environment is closing in.
- Spatial storytelling: The house is written almost like a tactical diagram. The balcony, sniper hole, metal door, driveway, gate, and courtyard all become crucial once grenades, Claymores, smoke, and the casevac plan collide.
- Memory-based realism: The opening caption tells the audience the film is built from soldiers’ memories. That choice shapes the writing: fragmented, procedural, sensory, immediate, and often brutally unsentimental.
- Chaos without confusion: Once the ambush begins, the action becomes overwhelming, but the writing keeps the reader oriented through concrete details: peach curtains, smoke rolling inward, the Bradley, the metal gate, Elliott’s wounds, Sam’s screams, and Ray’s radio traffic.
Questions for Writers
- How does the screenplay establish the house’s layout before turning that layout into the central action engine?
- Where does silence create more tension than dialogue?
- How does the script balance military specificity with emotional accessibility for readers who do not know the terminology?
- How does the presence of the Iraqi family complicate the mission without turning them into a subplot machine?
While reading, pay attention to how Warfare makes control disappear one layer at a time. First the soldiers lose air support. Then the minaret broadcast changes the atmosphere. Then fighters reach the balcony. Then a grenade enters the sniper room. Then the evacuation plan collapses in smoke, fire, and an IED at the gate. The craft trick is grim and powerful: the screenplay does not make chaos feel random. It makes chaos feel assembled from small tactical facts the audience has been quietly absorbing all along.
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Warfare (2025)
A platoon of Navy SEALs embark on a dangerous mission in Ramadi, Iraq, with the chaos and brotherhood of war retold through their memories of the event.
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