They Live in the Gray: The New Political Cinema

It’s nighttime in a quiet Ramadi neighborhood and a platoon of U.S. Navy SEALs prowls the streets. The sailors appear alien, invaders from afar, decked out in tactical gear and weaponry, as they look for a suitable place for an encampment. Unbound by any normal order, they find a house they like and wake up its residents, blowing up walls and ushering them all into a bedroom to wait. So begins “Warfare,” the 2025 Iraq War film from Alex Garland and co-director Ray Mendoza, who was one of the SEALs actually there that day. The film was marketed as a straightforward, realistic depiction of a simple military operation gone wrong, and the story of the American fighters who survived an insurgent assault.

Very little context is given in “Warfare,” which purports to be based on the memories of the soldiers involved. The date, location and the fact that the SEALs are meant to be lookouts supporting other local military operations are all the information the audience gets. Dialogue is present, but largely technical, and the plot, such as it exists, sticks to a barebones rendering of what became a deadly, brutal firefight and extraction. There is no statement of purpose in the film. No moral appeal to end war or support the troops. No open political critique. There is nothing other than images and sounds relating the memories of soldiers as filtered through filmmakers.

When it comes to politics, Hollywood prefers clarity, lest the audience misunderstand intentions. The general mode is explicitness. Recently, though, a number of filmmakers have sought to engage political discourse without any of the normal handholding. If intent is misunderstood, so be it. The economics of filmmaking are more punishing than ever, but the past two years have brought a slew of films from artists that offer a new framework for political filmmaking, one that eschews dogma in favor of ambiguity and leaves audiences to decide what to take from their experience. Ambiguity on matters moral and political is hardly typical of mainstream Hollywood filmmaking, particularly on issues as controversial as the Iraq War and U.S. military imperialism. Hollywood filmmakers — and their producers — rarely welcome political debate, always a potential death knell with a fickle mainstream moviegoing public unaccustomed to challenge.

Kathryn Bigelow’s “The Hurt Locker” (2008), which compellingly relates both a “war is hell” message and a more ambiguous read on its central character’s addictive relationship to violence, mostly avoided a real political analysis of the Iraq War, a quality criticized regularly in the years since its release. “Warfare” came in for similar criticism as soon as the first trailer dropped. Left-wingers were fairly skeptical of what looked like a new “Black Hawk Down,” another “realistic” depiction of American soldiers under attack that may have been anti-war in its disturbing display of bodily viscera, but whose valorization of the troops and inhuman portrait of the Somalis they were battling became catnip for a bloodthirsty domestic audience in the months after 9/11.

The impulse to simplify is hardly unique to war movies. Edward Berger’s “Conclave,” released last year, voices liberal dreams of a liberalized Catholic Church, which is no small part of its compulsive watchability and audience appeal. Even on the more left-wing, independent side of the industry, a film like “How to Blow Up a Pipeline” succeeds with a clear message of support for radical action on climate change, if not necessarily a full endorsement of violence. James Gunn made his “Superman” an explicitly anti-colonial blockbuster, and had the Man of Steel speechify about the importance of being human, coming in for plenty of right-wing ire, and applause from liberals. At this point, even the Man of Steel is no longer a pop culture figure of universal, unproblematic appeal.

In interviews, the filmmakers behind “Warfare” seemed to disagree about the movie’s overall intent. “I don’t think it is possible to make a statement about what war is really like without it being implicitly anti-war,” Garland told Sky News. Mendoza, meanwhile, was motivated to give voice to his fellow veterans, saying that making the film was “therapeutic.” Accuracy was the overriding concern, and as filmmakers the pair trusted the audience to make of the presentation what they would. That it ends with Americans and Iraqis alike dead and injured, a small corner of a peaceful neighborhood badly damaged by combat, a lingering feeling of trauma and a sharp feeling that it was all so pointless and inhuman can be taken any way you like. It’s the dehumanization and destruction of American imperialism laid bare, a reality getting only more extreme in the wake of cuts to foreign aid and health research and anti-refugee policy.

“Warfare” followed Garland’s 2024 blockbuster “Civil War,” which was accused of both sides-ing its depiction of a fictionalized America fractured into a state of armed conflict amid the rule of a fascist president. That Garland spoke about extremism on all sides in interviews about the film — and licensed footage from the likes of right-wing agitator Andy Ngo — only added to the impression of a filmmaker soft-pedaling right-wing threats. A closer look at “Civil War,” even one year later, reveals interests separate from any statement about, say, Donald Trump. It is a film about journalists attempting to capture and communicate the essence of a conflict as they directly witness it. Context is once again minimal — the existence of a nonsensical California-Texas alliance against authoritarian rule is unexplained, as though to signal to the viewer: This is all a fiction. But “Civil War” looks less slipshod the further the U.S. gets into the second Trump administration; the details of Garland’s conflict may have been fantasy, but its images of a country in the throes of a fascist takeover appear increasingly prescient. 

“Eddington,” the latest film from Ari Aster, is set in a small New Mexico town caught in the upheavals of the early COVID pandemic lockdowns and Black Lives Matter protests. Staged as something like a neo-Western comedic thriller, the film spares no one in its satire of a society fraying in a moment of crisis. While scenes of grating leftists lecturing Black police officers on the importance of fighting racism have earned side-eyes from some more wary critics, Aster has disagreed with the characterization of the film as “centrist,” a label that mistakes a lack of overt political message for a lack of political conviction.

On “The Big Picture” podcast, Aster discussed his love of writer Paddy Chayefsky, whose 1976 media satire “Network” is ceaselessly relevant. “I do find his work to be sometimes a little sermonizing,” Aster says, qualifying his passion, “very much to a fault.” Chayefsky’s decision to make the thesis of his film clearly rubs Aster wrong. “That’s where he loses me,” he says. It’s a funny comment when considering Chayefsky’s work in the shadow of even less nuanced liberal filmmakers like Stanley Kramer, director of 1967’s “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?,” the standard bearer for a certain kind of do-gooder Hollywood polemic. Many filmmakers have picked up the mantle over the last decade, from Rob Reiner to Ava DuVernay, producing work that varies wildly in quality and reception, but often feels dated just a few years later. For every “Selma” or “Lincoln” — a great modern masterpiece, and thornier than it lets on — there are many more like “The Ides of March,” “The Fifth Estate” and “Shock & Awe,” all best forgotten if they haven’t been already, their impact dulled by obviousness.

It’s not hard to discern Aster’s political sympathies by watching “Eddington.” Its characters live in individualized, social media-fed bubbles of reality, unable to truly communicate with one another, all while right-wing, corporate operatives profit from the chaos to build an AI data center nearby. Still, there’s nothing didactic in “Eddington,” which makes it challenging viewing for those weaned on a mainstream cinema that treats politics as a matter of grand, clear statements of political ideology. There’s no mistaking what films like Steven Spielberg’s “The Post” or Adam McKay’s “Don’t Look Up” are saying about the world, because they are ultimately message movies. Even a very good action-thiller like 2018’s “The First Purge” manages to be extremely, and excitingly upfront about its Black Lives Matter-influenced story of racial oppression by a violent state. There’s no mistaking its message. “Eddington” has no explicit message — though viewers wanting to glean lessons surely can—because its interest is more observational, more concerned with simply capturing the anxious feeling in the world post-COVID, the now-natural result of being politically informed. This is a different kind of political cinema.

It’s not a new approach, though uncommon in Hollywood, where ambiguity is more often a sin to be rooted out. Gillo Pontecorvo’s 1966 film “The Battle of Algiers,” though quite obviously sympathetic to the cause of the nationalist FLN party and Algerian independence, also takes its observational style seriously. The film depicts the actions of Algerian rebels without falling into starry-eyed endorsement, letting the audience come to terms with terrorist bombings and even the killing of children as grim facets of a righteous political struggle. This willingness to sit with the moral complexities of the world and not attempt to reconcile them is reflected in “Eddington,” but also several other recent films. Christopher Nolan’s best picture Oscar-winning “Oppenheimer” ends on the title physicist stating that he believes his building the atom bomb has put the world on an inevitable path to destruction. But it’s too late now. The bomb exists. There’s no clear lesson in this, which lends the ending disturbing force. Jonathan Glazer’s Oscar-winning “The Zone of Interest,” a cold, observational drama about the commandant of Auschwitz, makes no attempt at explicitly stating — or even showing — the evil its central family commits. These filmmakers trust the audience to understand what it is they’re watching and draw conclusions accordingly.

Leaving room for audience interpretation has affected response even to ostensibly lighter fare. Zach Cregger’s hit horror movie “Weapons,” about a town where a classroom full of children up and leave their homes at 2:17 a.m., never to return, has been dinged by some — this writer included! — for gesturing at various weighty ideas but ultimately not being about anything deeper. Still, the film lingers in the mind, because emptied classrooms and alcoholic teachers and shitty cops and dreams about giant floating AR-15 rifles are weighty in themselves. What emerges is a portrait, not unlike “Eddington,” of a society riven by loss and mistrust. Politics are not beside the point, but Cregger gives the audience space to find their own meaning in all those images and ideas, not unlike what he’d done while writing the film in the wake of his best friend’s tragic death.

A similar pattern occurred with Celine Song’s “Past Lives” follow-up, “Materialists.” Ostensibly a love triangle rom-com featuring three of Hollywood’s hottest stars, Song’s sensibility as a Brecht-inspired playwright is put to use deconstructing modern romance. Characters who, in a more typical rom-com, would have electric chemistry are instead noticeably detached. In the world of “Materialists,” materialism is the primary mover, with every interaction a transaction and every date a business negotiation. People barely feel like people. Song’s film does have a message, about the importance of pursuing love, but it offers no complete solution for a world succumbing to the full embrace of consumer capitalist logic.

It’s natural that, in various ways, all these films have had people bumping against them. In one of the more entertaining pans of “Materialists,” critic Sam Bodrojan writes, “’Materialists’ upset me deeply,” adding, “For all the speechifying that bloats the film’s runtime, its politics and themes only become more inscrutable the longer I sit here writing.” To this, my only response is: feature, not a bug. The film’s impossible embrace of romance in a cold stew of economic alienation isn’t designed to be scrutable, but merely left for consideration. It reflects a real-life impossibility, if not an entirely realistic dramatic situation. After all, it’s the point of drama, and fiction — whether pure fantasy like “Weapons” or fictionalized history like “Warfare” — to act as a mirror. In a world collapsing into distrust, hatred and authoritarianism, the creeping nihilism of the present moment is too great to accommodate easy answers. For a growing number of filmmakers, the answer instead is to reflect what they see as best as they can, without judgment, and with openness. This is the world as it is, they suggest, and how we navigate it is up to us.