Nov 1, 2019 10:48 AM

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare Has Nothing Interesting to Say

The latest title in the franchise fails to interrogate the realities of combat.

Four soldiers at night with light behind them

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare is a greedy videogame. It casts its net wide, aiming to be both entertaining and didactic, both power fantasy and a scathing critique of the warriors we fantasize about. Moreover, it wants to be a victory lap, an homage to the best Call of Duty game, and a title that gleefully gestures toward the franchise's past successes with all the self-congratulatory pleasure of a Star Wars sequel. As one might imagine, trying to accomplish all of these things simultaneously is a fool's errand, and, as a result, Modern Warfare has a hard time being much of anything at all.

As any Call of Duty adherent knows, the games are typically divided into separate modes, which share motifs and interests but little else in terms of content. Multiplayer is a big draw for these titles, but is often what's least interesting about them. Call of Duty's narrative campaigns are warfighter psychodramas, whole seasons of 24 packed into six to eight hours of gameplay, all built around straight-from-the-headlines paranoia and exhaustive research into the minutiae of Western military culture and equipment. For a long time, I've insisted that these campaigns are an insightful look into American id—into what bogeymen people are afraid of, and what horrible things they might secretly want to do to them.

Modern Warfare, a reboot created by what remains of the game’s original developers at Infinity Ward, tests that theory. Little in it feels prescient, or of the moment. The story follows American and British special forces alongside freedom fighters from a fictional Middle Eastern country—Urzikstan—chasing down terrorists and a rogue Russian military faction, both of which are intent on controlling Urzikstan. You, supposedly, are just trying to free the country, and the story escalates from small counterterror operations into battles built to prevent atrocities and ensure world stability all across the planet. It is, in short, the Call of Duty of 2007, rebuilt with a handful of retouches for modern sensibilities. Russians are cool as villains again, which is convenient for Infinity Ward, and now, at least, one of the protagonists is brown.

But Modern Warfare can't decide what, if anything, it wants to communicate or even ask about any of these elements. Multiple times in the game you have to clear residential houses, looking for your enemies. These sequences play out like Zero Dark Thirty in microcosm, as you tensely move from room to room, forced to judge on the fly between someone trying to hurt you and someone terrified that you're there. In these moments, you don't feel heroic, or like a noble warrior. Instead, you feel cruel, like a hired gun breaking down doors and murdering people as you please. Real suffering is here, too, and extended sequences show how terrifying being a civilian in a war zone can be.

But the game fails to properly capitalize on those negative feelings to ask any real probing questions about your behavior. Anyone shooting at you, even a civilian picking up a gun out of sheer terror, is labeled as an enemy in Modern Warfare, and your decisions to kill those people are never commented on. People on your side do evil things, occasionally, but you are notably and importantly exculpated from those evil acts at every turn. They're bad orders from bad actors in an otherwise good system, or heroes who have gone too far into the dark and turned into villains during the course of an awful war.

Late in the game, Captain Price, the series' most iconic character and held up in almost all situations as straightforwardly heroic, argues that doing morally questionable things on the battlefield is necessary to prevent even greater evil from taking place. The game seems to agree with him. And the worst crimes are always reserved for your enemies—terrorists, the Russians, people who as a group are painted almost entirely as chaotic evil, orcs in military dress—in order to make you feel better about your own transgressions. In its absolute nadir, Modern Warfare even whitewashes a real American atrocity—an incident called the Highway of Death, where Americans bombed a major road leading out of Kuwait during the Gulf War, firing on Iraqi soldiers but also on civilians, hostages, and even reportedly American intelligence fleeing the violence—by placing it in Urzikstan, committed not by Americans but by occupying Russians. In Modern Warfare, the United States never occupies Middle Eastern countries. Americans never drop death on the innocent. They are, amidst it all, the good guys.

Even more bizarre, this story, which attempts to throw in half-baked moral ambiguity, also tries to insert major plot ties to the original Modern Warfare trilogy, a bit of fan service that seems entirely at odds with a game that also thinks it has real, hard truths to impart about how awful war is and how much civilians suffer when the fighting starts. With its intentions so broadly spread, Modern Warfare instead is a game that says nothing at all. Its horrors feel pornographic, and even its thrills feel like imitations of better games in the series' past.

It's frustrating, because it's not difficult to imagine a version of Modern Warfare that tackles its interests much better. The gameplay, here, works—it's fast, clinical, and detached, which seems like a compelling opportunity to draw players into the murky confidence of misguided soldiers believing in their own heroism even as the rest of the game world disagrees. In fact, the series has done this before, in the original Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. In that game, the central set piece is about an American invasion leading to the detonation of a nuclear weapon in the Middle East. It's a clear satire of the invasion of Iraq, and shows how even soldiers on the ground operating with full belief in the rightness and heroism of their actions can easily stumble into situations that can cause immeasurable harm. The entire rest of the game is about fixing that mistake, about stopping the people empowered by bumbling American self-righteousness. You experience this as an American soldier, high on the empowerment of Call of Duty's mechanics, as the game tells you that, no, this was a mistake. You should not have been here. You should not have done this.

But this Modern Warfare insists that, no matter what goes wrong, you're in the right. I remember a moment toward the middle of the game, when a man takes a hostage in order to get you to open a door. He wants to rescue a fighter you took prisoner. If you open the door for him, the game gives you a game over screen. If you don't open it, as you're supposed to, the man kills his hostage. When this happens, Captain Price says, "Don't worry. We'll get him," insisting that your mission is more important than this hostage's life. Personally, I'm not convinced.