First he was citing Gina Gaston's report on KTRK about Houston-area cities like Tomball cancelling fireworks displays because of drought conditions. But it's not just local news in Houston that's captured the attention of The Colbert Report. Wednesday night, Colbert turned to KPRC anchor Owen Conflenti to deliver some bad news about ... helium?
Yes, helium. According to Conflenti, the U.S. Helium Reserve (we have one of those, I guess) has announced they will be out of helium by 2020. The reserve makes up half of the U.S.'s supply of the gas and a third of the global supply, and once it's gone, it's gone.
That's both hilarious (Colbert notes the demise of dirigibles and balloon animals) and potentially serious. As Cracked noted last year,
Actually, if you have benefited from a piece of technology more complex than a sharp rock tied to a stick, it was probably made with the help of helium. Helium has the lowest boiling point of all materials on Earth, which means it's cooler than a ninja Fonzie in sunglasses. Basically every high-tech industry imaginable has uses for helium, from chilling MRI magnets to producing fiber optics and LCD screens.
(Sidebar: Do not click that link unless you are prepared to build a bunker for when the world runs out of critical staples like water, chocolate and tequila.)
So I guess the end of helium is one way to tear yourself away from that Blackberry. But not being able to talk like a chipmunk? Now that's a tragedy.
At this point in movie history, there are precious few ways to make a war film feel original. Every major American war, including the most recent ones in Iraq and Afghanistan, has been covered, and the “war is hell” idea has been featured in too many films to count. So for a film like the new Warfare to stand out, it needs to do something that other war films have not.
To say that it accomplishes that goal is an understatement. Set in Iraq in 2006, it follows a platoon of soldiers tasked with helping to gain control of the city of Ramadi, a hotbed of activity in the war at that time. But this is not a story of good triumphing over evil, nor one that tries to examine exactly what the U.S. military was trying to accomplish in the war. Instead, it’s just a story of a group of young men trying to do the job they’re asked to do, and what happens to them during that mission.
It presents as fact, with no judgment either way, that one squad of the platoon overtakes the home of two Iraqi families as part of the mission. An ensuing firefight pins the soldiers down with almost no way to escape, and subsequent rescue attempts by other squads result in multiple casualties. The bulk of the film focuses on how the shell-shocked and injured soldiers react to the situation in which they find themselves.
Written and directed by Alex Garland (Civil War) and Ray Mendoza, the film is based on the memories of Mendoza and his fellow soldiers of this exact situation they experienced. As such, the film does not attempt to add extra drama or even emphasize one character over another. In fact, the first 30-40 minutes of the film are relatively boring, as the squad relays information about their position to other, unseen people.
The men in the platoon are not exactly interchangeable with each other, but the way the film is structured, they’re essentially equals. It’s easy to tell who the leaders are, but those giving orders are not treated as more important to the film than those carrying them out. This is especially true when things go to hell, as each person goes from trying to fight to trying to survive, with their training coming into play in different ways.
The situation depicted in the film is somewhat mundane - it’s not some big battle or a turning point in the war - but the intensity with which Garland and Mendoza stage it makes it enormously impactful. They put the audience right in the thick of the carnage, and the horrific injuries inflicted on some of the men, as well as the seemingly never-ending screams of pain emanating from them, can be difficult to take.
The cast features a few actors who are starting to make names for themselves (Will Poulter, Joseph Quinn, Noah Centineo, Charles Melton Michael Gandolfini), others who’ve had smaller impacts (D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai, Cosmo Jarvis, Evan Holtzman), and plenty of others who have yet to get their big breaks. Each of them does their job extremely well, which in this case means that they complement each other’s performances, with none of them overshadowing the others.
Warfare is not an overtly political film, and yet the politics of war are inextricable from the story it tells. Neither anti-war nor pro-war, it simply lays out the facts of one individual mission in a larger conflict, and each viewer will likely take away something different from the experience of watching it.
