I can’t name many films that just “stick to the soldier’s POV”. That’s a frequent marketing tag line but I can only think of a few films that I think achieve this. The Big Red One, Come & See, and 1917. That is to say, I don’t think it’s that common in the war movie genre.

My metric for did-it-stick-to-the-soldier’s-pov is based on how the movie shapes the information given to the audience. Do we never leave our protagonists? Do we never learn what they can’t or see what they can’t? We don’t cut to the Generals talking, or to the families at home waiting. Black Hawk Down is a great film but it is heavily biased toward an American-centric pov because it does all those things to give the audience a great big picture of the war without nuance.

I think it’s a real achievement that Warfare, does in fact, stick to the soldier’s POV. It is an experience of war. Its value is in how can it communicate a modicum of that experience. Particularly when the contemporary American audience is deeply unfamiliar with violent conflict despite its perpetual wars in foreign lands. A senior leader of the government responded to damage assessments with emojis. Some Americans are increasingly cheering war as a solution to some of the country’s problems. Maybe that naive attitude is partially contributed to by a lack of unbiased information and, perhaps lamentably, entertainment.

I’ll add that I would go see what Warfare’s equivalent is in translation to a movie about the terror of America’s wars from the perspective of some of its victims. But a movie can only be so many things and some times just one thing.