@divedivedive This is my surprised face.
I approve of this and any other usage of Brian Blessed OBE.
I also love submarine video games! But I am very bad at them. I should probably rename my account to “crush depth.”
These are all fantastic, I come back and there are a bazillion responses. I’ll pick like 4 to bow to and then add a couple of runner ups to my list, I guess.
@Ginger_Yellow 's Full Metal Jacket
Wow. A Runner-up. Probably the truest “on the ground” War film I have ever seen, along with the trench scenes in Paths of Glory. Kubrick. Wow.
@Calelari 's The Bridge Over the River Kwai
I go on and on about this in the Grandpa thread.
@Jason_Levine 's Tora! Tora! Tora!
The most accurate, detailed, military history on film, possibly ever made.
@BrianRubin’s Damn the Defiant!
Underrated classic. Fantastic perfromances.
Two runner ups:
I share your ineptitude. If I had a dollar for every time I’ve lawn-darted a 688 in Cold Waters… I could buy a 688.
Helllsss yeah.
And to complete my list (aka My Top 4 Which Haven’t Already Been Mentioned):
and…
- Paths of Glory
- Lawrence of Arabia
- The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (well, it’s kind of a war film)
- Gettysburg (flawed as all get-out, but I just love it anyway)
Seven Samurai would be in my list but I don’t quite see it as a war film. It could be considered one, though, I think. Or at least a ‘small scale combat’ film…
Gettysburg is so bloated, Gordon, but I hear you. :)
Lawrence is another of my runners up for two reasons:
Easily the hardest “Top Four,” question for me. Especially so as my picks have changed so much both before and after serving.
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(By a longshot) Saving Private Ryan - Nothing has depicted war this way, before, nor after. No war film has ever left me as agape in hyper-realism.
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The Bridge On The River Kwai - Because of this, and because the movie is fantastic.
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Schindler’s List - War is not pretty, it is not valorous, it is not for any better cause. It is about killing and control. It is horrible. And it takes a movie that brings you fully to absolute tears to understand, even if only a tiny bit, the cost of war.
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Das Boot - Gripping, nerve wracking, sad and gloomy, all rolled up into the finest submarine movie ever made.
Honorable Mention - Sometimes just one part of a war movie strikes me as relatable. For this list, Full Metal Jacket is that movie. The entire run-through of basic training is so, at once, spot-on, and yet also so out there that I enjoy watching that part any time it is on. The rest of the movie degrades into what I consider less than stellar war movie fare.
@Jason_Levine picked Gettysburg, which is fantastic and would make my list
@BrianRubin named Master and Commander which I didn’t think of, but now that it got mentioned also makes my list.
I just like this one a lot. No particular reason, but the framing of the story works well for a character driven piece. Probably my favorite Steve McQueen film.
I’m sure I’ll catch flack from some of you, because Spielberg, but this is a guy punch movie. Harrowing, yet hopeful. A needed counterweight to the often too glorifying war films we see.
Speaking of films that don’t glorify the war they cover, I wonder when we’ll get the ‘Apocalypse Now’ of Iraq or Afghanistan. Because it seems like there should be more of that, given what films about Vietnam we got.
Edit: @Skipper beats me by seconds.
Leave us not forget:
I know, right?!
That is why I put “War Films” in quotes in the thread. That covers a lot of ground in a lot of different minds.
For me, it doesn’t make my top twenty even, probably of “War Films” but it might on a list of “Action Films”.
Since technically my last choice was just pointing out it had already mentioned, I kind of want to get my Sean Bean on by including
if the judges will allow it and all its sequela.
That’s quite okay. We can cry together re-watching it, my man.
I have to agree with this. My list was a little bit tongue-in-cheek, but SPR tops my list of conventional war films. (Though I think Band of Brothers is actually better.)
I’m surprised no one has mentioned Black Hawk Down or Dunkirk. Dunkirk is the best war-movie-as-horror-movie film out there. And BHD is the war on terror film that pre-dates the war on terror.
I think war films often suffer from being written by the victors. The Bridge on the River Kwai is a great example. I was there a couple of years ago (in Kanchanaburi), visited the Death Railway Museum. The fates of the hundreds of thousands of Thai and Burmese conscripts on that railway were far worse and a couple of magnitudes more numerous than the Allied POWs, but that’s hardly apparent from the film or French novel it’s based on. All Quiet on the Western Front is powerful because it’s utterly hopeless: there’s no redemption, no victory, no coming back. The best Iraq/Afghanistan films will be made by people from there.
I included The Big Lebowski in my list specifically to showcase how war in the modern era is often distant and has little effect on people in countries waging them.
I’ve heard this is an excellent series.
Brian did.
I always pair my watching of Kwai with Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence. For that reason. The end scene makes me cry, literally, every time.
