Elden Ring, the 2028 IMAX-sized movie version of Hidetaka Miyazaki’s action RPG, may complete an unlikely trilogy for writer-director Alex Garland. Garland is no stranger to genre fiction — he’s written 28 Days Later, its two recent sequels, Sunshine, and directed Ex Machina and Annihilation — but zooming out, the movie looks less like a heady storyteller (and avid gamer) getting his crack at a Lord of the Rings-flavored epic than a logical conclusion to an exploration of memory and combat.
The casting of Kit Connor as an unknown character — but likely a dude wielding a sword — feels like the tipoff: there was Civil War, there was Warfare, and there will soon be a movie based on a game where you fight a multi-armed shardbearer named Godrick the Grafted that fits right alongside them.
Civil War was a big hit for A24 when it swept into theaters in 2024 with its explosive, discourse-friendly take on a theoretical internal U.S. conflict. Warfare, despite a cast stacked with our finest young actors, flew a bit more under the radar — likely because it’s 100% harder to watch. While Civil War made me squirm over the possibilities of lines drawn across my country, ideologies leading to large-scale terrorism and backyard assassination, Warfare ripped straight from the headlines. Garland collaborated on the film with Ray Mendoza, a former Navy SEAL whose memories of the Battle of Ramadi during the Iraq War were funneled directly into the screenplay. Chronicling a real-time operation that goes awry, the film is procedural but unrelenting. It’s a war movie at its most immersive.
Connor costars as the youngest member of his SEAL team, a gunner who works with the utmost diligence in saving his fellow soldiers, but in the grand scheme of the violent conflict, might as well be another body on the line in the name of American intervention. In Warfare, there is very little character development outside of whatever the boys can convey while observing possible insurgent activity. The co-directors buck nearly every filmmaking trope to near experimental ends.
Garland has described his vision for Warfare as hewing close to the stripped-down Dogme 95 movement established by Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier and Thomas Vinterberg, where the constructs of filmmaking (even use of tripods and re-recorded sound) were obliterated in order to purify the experience. The directors still rely on heavy sound design to sell the impact of a grenade thrown into tight quarters or rapid gunfire going off within earshot, but you can tell Garland and Mendoza stuck to facts — or the fragments recounted by the survivors — as much as possible. What transpires speaks volumes on all the loaded topics revolving around war more than didactic moralizing or more pointed three-act structure.
Fans of Connor’s work on Netflix’s Heartstoppers, or those curious how he might fare traversing the Lands Between in Garland’s adaptation of Elden Ring, won’t get much out of Warfare — it’s not a showcase for one actor’s work. There are no whispered death monologues designed for Oscar-worthy reels or even low-key character work that might humble him to an audience. But the fact that Connor disappears into the squad is a testament to the effort that both he and Garland seem ready to commit to the project. Connor underwent a grueling boot camp regimen that prepared him to sell not just his own, but an entire platoon’s skillset on the battlefield.
That may sound completely irrelevant to a movie with monsters and magic and giant swords, but considering how much Garland loves FromSoftware games — especially Dark Souls — one expects Connor’s willingness to give himself over to a director, and one demanding physicality and reflection on war, might be exactly what this film needs. Garland talking about Dark Souls sounds a lot like Garland talking about the memories of war he seized upon with Mendoza to flesh out Warfare in the most hyperrealistic way possible.
“The Dark Souls games seem to have this embedded poetry in them,” Garland told GameSpot in 2020. “You’ll be wandering around and find some weird bit of dialogue with some sort of broken song with a bit of armor outside a doorway, and it feels like you’ve drifted into some existential dream. That’s what I really love about Dark Souls. These spaces are so imaginative, and they seem to flow into each other and flow out of each other. It’s very dreamlike.”
You have plenty of time to play through Elden Ring before it arrives in theaters on March 3, 2028, but maybe take a deep breath and summon the strength to watch Warfare, too. (It’s streaming now on HBO Max.)
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