War! What Is It Good For? Apparently, Extremely Compelling Films…
25. The Pianist
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Adrien Brody’s Oscar celebration was a moment unto itself (hello, Halle Berry), but it’s his performance as Wladyslaw Szpilman in Roman Polanski’s intimate epic that reverberates loudest all these years later. The Pianist tells the story of a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust through stoicism and good luck. In telling this harrowing tale, adapted from Szpilman’s 1946 memoir, Polanski draws on his own childhood in Poland (he escaped the Krakow ghetto, though his mother died in a concentration camp). Present is his soul-deep faith in the tender mercies of art.
24. Dunkirk
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This virtuoso reenactment of the 1940 evacuation of 400,000 British and Allied soldiers stranded on the beach is the highest-grossing WWII film ever made. Christopher Nolan sticks largely to the formula that’s established him as the early 21st century’s most bankable auteur. He immerses the audience in the action by placing them close to the subjective points-of-view of his characters’ experiences on land, sea, and air. Shot with 65mm and IMAX cameras, it’s a straightforward sensory overload.
23. Inglourious Basterds
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Fueled by its creator’s unwavering belief in the power of film (more specifically, in his own films), Inglourious Basterds is the most gleefully irreverent depiction of the Third Reich. Brad Pitt plays Nazi-killing Lt. Aldo Raine in Quentin Tarantino’s alternate-history take on World War II. This film introduced the world at large to Christoph Waltz. It also showed us that, in this one-of-a-kind auteur’s world, movies are so powerful that they can literally kill Hitler.
22. Letters from Iwo Jima
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In 2006, Clint Eastwood released two war movies. Flags of Our Fathers was a soggy story behind the iconic raising of the American flag at the battle of Iwo Jima. Letters from Iwo Jima, however, is Eastwood’s most ambitious modern offering as a director. Both of these epic features were shot back-to-back. Each explored 1945’s battle of Iwo Jima from opposing perspectives. Dominating proceedings is Ken Watanabe as Kuribayashi, a brilliant general harboring deeply conflicted views about the country he serves.
21. Black Hawk Down
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Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down tells the story of a U.S. military raid in Somalia that went disastrously wrong when optimistic plans ran into unexpected resistance. In 1993, 18 Americans lost their lives, and 70 more were wounded. Within days, President Clinton pulled out troops that were on a humanitarian mission. Scott’s them-against-us war procedural is about as relentless as Saving Private Ryan — but without the bullsh*t plot, hokey dialogue and in-your-face flag-waving.
20. Empire of the Sun
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Based on a novel by J. G. Ballard, Empire of the Sun is set in 1941. It focuses on Jim Graham (Christian Bale) — an English boy living with his wealthy parents in Shanghai. When the Japanese invade, Jim is separated from his mother and father, and ends up living alone in his abandoned house whilst wandering the streets of Shanghai. Empire of the Sun is pure Spielberg, and a perfect match of director and material. Unlike previous Spielberg films, this is less a celebration of the wonders of childhood and more a lament for the loss of a child’s innocence.
19. Beasts of No Nation
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From the outset, Cary Fukunaga’s searing study of corrupted youth makes it clear you’re in a safe pair of directorial hands. Fukunaga brings flair, muscular storytelling, directness, and a persuasively epic sweep to this brutal, heartrending movie about child soldiers and a civil war in an imaginary West African country. When the film kicks into gear, we witness 12-year-old Agu (Abraham Attah) lose his family in the most traumatic manner imaginable. He then falls under the influence of a dangerously charismatic warlord known as the Commandant (Idris Elba).
18. The Great Escape
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The Great Escape, released in 1963, was loosely based on the true story of an ambitious escape by Allied prisoners in World War II. The film’s central protagonists are American, British, and Australian POWs. They are confined to a prison camp deep inside Nazi Germany. Widely considered a classic, the movie was especially known for the direction by John Sturges and for a cast that included Steve McQueen in one of his defining roles.
17. The Hurt Locker
“The rush of battle is a potent and often lethal addiction, for war is a drug.”
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This is the quotation that opens the film. Kathryn Bigelow spends the next two hours underscoring both the lethal nature and addictive components of combat. The Hurt Locker follows an army unit that specializes in detonating bombs. It centers on the unit’s leader, Will (Jeremy Renner), who is a hardened soldier with a penchant for breaking the rules. The film does not focus on the reasons American soldiers are discovering bombs strapped to innocent Iraqi civilians. Instead, it chooses to focus on the toll of having to make constant life-or-death decisions takes on the human psyche.
16. Hacksaw Ridge
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Mel Gibson mounted a major comeback with his fifth feature. This is a viscerally powerful and emotionally satisfying action drama about the horrors of war. You may have issues with the star’s past history of anger and intolerance, but you’ll have no issue with Hacksaw Ridge — a movie about a different kind of brave heart. It’s the fact-based, World War II story of Private First Class Desmond T. Doss (played by Andrew Garfield). Doss was the first conscientious objector to receive the Congressional Medal of Honor for heroically rescuing 75 men without ever lifting a gun.
15. Schindler’s List
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Wars are about more than just what happens on the front lines. The ugly reality is that the practices of Nazi Germany before and during WWII created countless stories similar to the one in Schindler’s List, wherein a German businessman acted to save thousands of Jews from extermination. Spielberg directs this masterpiece with all the respect it deserves, and the result is a powerful, tear-jerking account of one man’s courage in the face of horror.
14. Three Kings
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David O’ Russell’s Three Kings is some kind of weird masterpiece. It’s a screw-loose war picture that sends action and humor crashing head-on and spinning off into political anger. Major Archie Gates (George Clooney) retires in two weeks, sergeant Troy Barlow (Mark Wahlberg) is a new father, and Chief Elgin (Ice Cube) is on a four-month paid vacation from Detroit. Saddam Hussein stole a great deal of gold from Kuwait, and these soldiers have no problem with stealing it from him. On their way to collect their booty, they bear witness to the disturbing results of the war effort.
13. Paths of Glory
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Paths of Glory is the closest the movies will ever get to producing an anti-war statement (though Stanley Kubrick’s trim World War I opus is better qualified as being disdainful of war). One can sense Kubrick’s contempt for his antagonists seething from behind the camera. This also includes a righteous indignation at the unapologetic cowardice of the craven old men who send others off to die on the field of battle. Maybe Paths of Glory isn’t necessarily anti-war, but it is pro-human.
12. Das Boot
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Das boot means “the boat” in English, which is a fitting title for a movie that mostly takes place on-board a submarine. The boat in question belongs to the Germans during World War II, and a significant portion of the film depicts the moments in between the fighting. It focuses on the sheer boredom of all of the crew aboard the submarine, and the relationships between the higher and lower ranks. Director Wolfgang Peterson’s breakout is an experience. Das Boot is one of the finest submarine movies in all of cinema.
11. Patton
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This Franklin J. Schaffner’s colossal biographical ode to one of World War II’s most renowned and most controversial military figures. You get the sense that General George S. Patton would likely dig Schaffner’s work. Patton is a war movie, make no mistake, but it uses the war movie blueprint for housing a character study of its protagonist. The film doesn’t exactly flatter the general, but straddles a line between hero worship and sober representation. The film lets Patton, and by extension George C. Scott’s commanding and iconic portrait of him, speak for himself without fear of condemnation.
10. Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World
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Peter Weir’s Napoleonic War adventure plays a long game of cat-and-mouse over two oceans. It involves a French vessel and the British HMS Surprise. Based on the beloved novels of Patrick O’Brian, it re-creates the world of the British navy circa 1805 with such detail and intensity that the sea battles become stages for personality and character. Starring Russell Crowe and Paul Bethany, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World is an exuberant sea adventure told with uncommon intelligence.
9. Gone with the Wind
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A set of three directors — along with some tortuous Hollywood deal-making — lay behind David O. Selznick’s magnificently overblown, multiple award-winning Civil War blockbuster, Gone with the Wind. Vivien Leigh plays Southern belle Scarlett O’Hara in a lavish historical melodrama which overly romanticizes the slave-owning Old South. However, it also features the first African-American Oscar-winner in Hattie McDaniel. It was re-released periodically throughout the 20th century, and thus became ingrained in popular culture.
8. The Deer Hunter
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Taking a leaf from Coppola’s Godfather, director Michael Cimino opens his story slowly with an extended working- class Russian-Orthodox wedding sequence. This occurs in the three lead characters’ Pennsylvania mining hometown. He then plunges us directly into the flaming maelstrom of the war itself. Michael, Steven and Nick (Robert De Niro, John Savage and Christopher Walken) find themselves trapped and captured after a vicious firefight. They’re then forced by their Vietcong captors to play a nightmare version of Russian roulette.
7. Bridge on the River Kwai
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The film chronicles the convergence of British soldiers in a Japanese POW camp led by Colonel Saito — an intense and often sadistic officer. The ranking British officer, Lt. Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness) is so by-the-book that he philosophizes about whether his men have a duty to try to escape. A frequent contender for the “greatest film of all time” crown, David Lean’s incredible war movie would go on to win seven Academy Awards (including Best Picture).
6. Platoon
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You can boil down Platoon to a single iconic image — Willem Dafoe gets gunned down by Vietnamese soldiers as his fellow infantrymen bear witness to his grim and lonesome demise. Writer-director Oliver Stone sought to immerse the audience totally in the nightmare of the United States’ misguided adventure. Three decades later, Stone’s autobiographical offering impresses less than the more surreal, less accurate Vietnam pictures like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket. With that said, its style and brutality still make it a seriously affecting movie.
5. Saving Private Ryan
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Despite its overwhelming scale, Saving Private Ryan is an astounding accomplishment of storytelling. Barely a year into his role with Dreamworks, Spielberg created a nearly three-hour portrait of Europe in the waning weeks of World War II. He did this without once allowing the nightmare of the war to overtake the characters at its heart. Over 20 years later, the film’s opening 30-minute scene — detailing in documentary-like grit the D-Day invasion on the beaches of Normandy — still stands as iconic war filmmaking.
4. Full Metal Jacket
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You’ll notice that although all of the movies on this list revolve around a war, the vast majority focus on what happens just before or soon after an army invades. Full Metal Jacket is no different, as the entire first half of the film depicts the training of a U.S. Marine platoon about to head to Vietnam. It focuses on Joker and Pyle, two new recruits who have significantly different experiences during training and during the war itself. Kubrick’s film message is not one of hope or empowerment, but of the demoralizing meaninglessness of war.
3. Lawrence of Arabia
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Look up the word “epic” and you just might find David Lean’s marathon masterpiece about the heroic British intelligence officer T.E. Lawrence, and his struggles to win the freedom of the Arabs against the Ottoman Turks in World War I. Spectacular scenery and cinematography, combined with an incredible script by Robert Bolt and the directorial genius of Lean make Lawrence of Arabia an indelible experience. Peter O’Toole got the role of a lifetime and gave the performance of his lifetime, receiving his first nomination for the Academy Award for Best Actor.
2. Zero Dark Thirty
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With Zero Dark Thirty, director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal set out to dramatize what really happened in the decade-long search for Osama bin Laden. Chameleon Jessica Chastain earned her second Oscar nomination as Maya, a tough-as-nails CIA agent based on the real undercover operative who doggedly pursued the Al-Qaeda leader. Zero Dark Thirty is, like the story it chronicles, a sprawling enterprise — one that earns every minute of its two-and-a-half-hour-plus running time.
1. Apocalypse Now
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Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now is not just one of the best war movies, it’s one of the best movies of all-time. Marlon Brando plays Kurtz, an American Colonel gone rogue, and Martin Sheen plays Willard, a Captain sent to eliminate Kurtz. Loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, this war turns men into monsters, and leads them on a descent into a primal, lawless state of mind. Apocalypse Now is an introspective film, gesturing instead at the morality (or lack thereof) of war and its effects on those involved in it.
