Before he had directed a single movie, Alex Garland already built up a strong reputation in the world of genre filmmaking. Introduced to Danny Boyle via his novel The Beach, which Boyle adapted into a 2000 film starring Leonardo DiCaprio, Garland collaborated more directly with Boyle on his next high-profile project, 28 Days Later, which appropriately brought the zombie film back from the dead. From there, they reteamed on the less-seen but absolutely sensational Sunshine, a sci-fi movie with horror overtones, best described as an Armageddon with a smaller budget, less obnoxious characters, and a better class of space madness.

But Garland truly came into his own as a brand-name filmmaker with his directorial debut Ex Machina, a three-hander about a computer programmer (Domhnall Gleason) selected by a tech CEO (Oscar Isaac) to test out an unnerving lifelike new robotic life form (Alicia Vikander). Between that and the weirder Annihilation, Garland established himself as a post-Nolan sci-fi auteur, the kind of director who, like Denis Villeneuve, is revered for the hushed seriousness with which he treats his material, as well as the exacting compositions he presents it in. While the movies he wrote for Boyle tend to focus on people banding together or collectively breaking down in response to existential threats, Garland’s own movies as a director favor smaller-scale stories where humanity is, in a sense, at war with itself.

Or at least, they used to. Over the past year, Garland has unexpectedly reinvented himself as a chronicler of actual war. Following the more allegorical (and even more stripped-down) Men, sort of a haunted-mind movie where the ghost is male toxicity, Garland returned last year with his biggest hit yet: Civil War, a divisive film imagining the late days of an armed conflict within these United States, following a group of photojournalists as they cover the conflict. There wasn’t a trace of the fantastical (well, beyond the idea that California and Texas might agree to team up), but the alternate-world premise gave it some kinship with his sci-fi movies. His new companion film Warfare, though, confirms that Garland’s interests (at least for the moment) don’t seem to lie with otherworldly windows into our world. Rather, he wants to look at soldiers as clearly and unvarnished as possible.

Garland co-wrote and co-directed the film with Ray Mendoza, his military advisor on Civil War, and it’s based on Mendoza’s experiences in the Iraq War – or rather, it’s based on a specific experience in 2006. Warfare, presented more or less in real time, follows a group of Navy SEALs holed up in a civilian building. They’re attacked, some soldiers are injured, and they have to try to evacuate. That’s the story, reconstructed from the collective memories of Mendoza’s team. Though a group of Hollywood actors play the soldiers – Will Poulter, Charles Melton, Joseph Quinn, Cosmo Jarvis, Michael Gandolfini, and D’Pharaoh Woon-A-Tai are among the established performers – their faces are less recognizable, somehow, than usual. Maybe it’s the heavy military gear, or maybe it’s the nature of the material, which has such immediacy and verisimilitude that it banishes thoughts of character arcs, plot points, and other narrative niceties. The idea seems to be to combine documentary realism with the control and command of fiction filmmaking.

So how did Garland get here, from the doominess of speculative sci-fi to the unadorned observational doominess of men in combat? There are military elements of 28 Days Later and Annihilation indicating some interest in the dynamics of the armed forces, but those movies, especially the zombie picture, show a certain skepticism toward the chain of military command. With Warfare, Garland has worked his way back to respecting the troops, taking the attempt at impartiality that rankled so many about Civil War to a stylistic extreme. Value judgments don’t enter into the story; these are people, doing their jobs, for good or for ill, risking their own lives, and the lives of others. It might be a stretch to describe the movie as neutral, because it certainly provokes a possible range of reactions; it’s nearly impossible to make a combat-steeped movie that doesn’t. But nor does the movie feel ambiguous about what it portrays, even if the feelings are intentionally ambivalent. It wants to be an experience, first and foremost.

On those terms, as a combat film supposedly constructed from memories, Warfare is effective, though maybe not as mold-breaking as its creators seem to think. Plenty of movies have attempted to get audiences to feel closer to the horrors of war, whether through the virtuosic, stylized chaos of Saving Private Ryan; the high-frame-rate intensity of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk; or the ultra-close character study of The Hurt Locker. Those movies imposed more narrative on their material, of course, but if anything, Warfare is interesting for similar reasons, not its refusal to play the game. Inevitably, any film, even one with aspirations toward objectivity, must emphasize certain elements over others (especially when it’s taking viewers into an experience as deeply subjective as memories of war). What stands out in this one next to more traditional, cliché-ridden battlefield movies is its attention to the wounded; the film lingers on the pain of two soldiers who are badly hurt by an IUD, and who their fellow soldiers must do their best to treat. Their cries of pain aren’t use to quickly illustrate a point before cutting away or moving toward a tragic but quick end; the agony remains audible, the attempts at triage messy. Most of the movie isn’t about strategically deployed weapons or plans of attack. It’s about temporary stopping the bleeding.

That’s as good an Iraq War metaphor as any. Why now, though? Is it only after nearly 20 years that audiences can handle such an unflinching look at modern combat, or is Garland dissatisfied with the steady stream of movies that have attempted (granted, often flailing) to portray the Iraq War? Even with the participation of Mendoza, there’s a slight air of tourism to Garland’s increasingly anti-speculative movies – thought experiments that are less thoughtful or experimental than they first appear. In their way, both Civil War and Warfare reflect a certain despair about humanity’s capacity for violence, but Garland’s sci-fi movies (and, for that matter, Men) feel more willing to actually confront the present. Even Civil War, a more traditionally suspenseful and engaging story than Warfare with an abiding interest in the mechanics of wartime journalism, seems less than genuinely curious about actual social or cultural divisions. Around the release of Civil War, Garland was accused of affecting a kind of both-sides-y loftiness. Warfare is convincing evidence that he’s after something else, though it’s equally frustrating: A way of examining history not as a lens for the future, but as a chin-stroking exercise in faux-journalism.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn podcasting at www.sportsalcohol.com. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others.