What if it was more generic than that. More like War Era films, settings and characters and events that are touched by War or large notable conflicts but not necessarily about solders or on the war itself. There’s a large amount of content like that.
The other one that is lighter but still interesting are any of the children’s movies, books… that ones where you see the influence of war but they’re designed for children. Those are intriguing because you can see the influence but there might be magic, or adventure right alongside a house that was reduced to rubble sort of thing.
Sorry didn’t mean to bring your topic down to depressing levels.
Well, don’t worry about that. You keep doing you! It’s been a really transcendental conversation.
More that My Rorschach test proved to me that if a film doesn’t address the savagery, inhumanity and ambiguity in War, it isn’t going to be a “great” War Film in my mind that touches me.
It’s more debating a genre category that would have “Holocaust Film” as a sub-genre that depresses me.
And I intellectually disagree on a lot of those not quite being “War Films”; Empire of the Sun, for instance, is solidly a War Film. I think someone earlier (I’ll have to read through) mentioned a really great (and broad) criteria for “War Films”.
I don’t think either of us did. I found it tonally bizarre, Benigni mugging his way through the holocaust just didn’t work for me. And I never heard from her again, but maybe she just didn’t like the company.
Thanks for starting this thread. It is been very interesting. I use to think that I was a big sci-fi fan, but having heard of virtually all of these films and having seen the vast majority, I realize I’m actually much more of war film buff than sci-fi film buff. I guess also there are a lot more sci films than war films made each year, and so it is easier to watch the good one.
Thanks for that. I really did appreciate these original list. This year I’ve watched some new and old war films and it got me thinking that while all of them have interesting stories, not all of them are good movies or film. For instance, Windtalkers… and the sinking of USS Indianapolis and the court martial after it, truly unique but they lack a lot of elements that you see in the top movies listed here.
Pretty much this. Although I’d say it shifts the movie from ‘meh’ to ‘risible’ and utterly destroys it. I have a pretty good friend who put it on his list of top ten movies of that year, and when I reacted with shock he came back with, “It’s Spielberg swinging for the fences.” I’ve watched it more than once, and I just think it’s somewhat serviceable Spielberg. Until the cutting of the sex scene, wherein it becomes a disaster.
But what do I know? I put The Hunt for Red October on my list.
I have a good friend from college who went on a first date to see Blue Velvet. She didn’t end up going out with the guy again, as it turns out.
Two very good examples, especially Windtalkers. I remember meeting one of the Navajo Windtalkers and his lovely granddaughter a few years ago, and deciding that it would just be insulting to even bring up that movie.
Unbroken wasn’t nearly so bad, but what made the book so interesting was less the time being on the raft, or the standard awful POW experience in a Japanese camp, but what Louis Zamperini did after the war. The movie barely touched on it.
I just recently saw something about Dunkirk being added to some great movie list, and after doing my eyeroll, I double checked, nope not on this group’s list.
Some of these movies are not that bad but when you have that great of a story, like something that seems so unbelievable that might be rejected as too unbelievable if it were fiction, and you wind up with a bad or just mediocre movie about it… you know something isn’t right.
That’s cool that you met someone. I thought one of the bigger issues with that movie was that is focused so much on… not the Windtalkers.
Yeah, I thought of Life Is Beautiful too. It’s a much warmer film overall and I’m not sure how they managed to make certain scenes so simultaneously funny and utterly heartbreaking. That floored me.
Oh no!
Yeah, my girlfriend and I weren’t keen on it either. There were things about it we liked but compared to a lot of the stuff being shared here it just doesn’t hold up.
The only war film I would recommend others to see is just Apocalypse Now. Others already recommended many worthy candidates, like Black Hawk Down, Saving Private Ryan, but IMO they are flawed one way or another (to keep a long story short).
I thought Dunkirk should be on the list, but I worried that because I saw it so recently I’m giving it too much weight. If in 5 years time I still think it is good enough then it is good enough.
If a war film is just a film where war is the subject matter, then The Fog of War should be on the list:
An absolute classic documentary, in particular with Errol Morris’s use of Philip Glass’s music, and giving McNamara the intellectual and emotional complexities that he deserved.
Van Johnson, who was disqualified from military service by a rather horrific car accident injury, made a bunch of WWII films in which he played the good-looking All-American type. He hid the facial scars from the accident with heavy makeup throughout his career. Two of his best war movies were:
And this, which is probably still the best movie about the Battle of the Bulge (the Band of Brothers mini-series excepted);
I think Spielberg is embarrassed by sex scenes, which may explain why there are so few in his films. But it’s not the only time a wretched scene takes (or almost) takes one of his films off the rails. I thought the ring scene in Schindler’s List was as bad in its own way. It was as if Spielberg the sentimentalist couldn’t bear to have the hero remain his unvarnished self. He had to transform into a saint. The real Schindler never transformed. He tried to sponge money off the survivors years after the war. But he was still a hero and I think presenting that flawed hero would have made the movie even better than it was.
Agreed here. I had forgotten about that film. One of history’s monsters, in his own words. Chilling.
I liked Dunkirk. I think it’s a great war film and should probably be on a list of greats. I like the paucity of dialogue, the grinding, inexorable build of tension, and the horror film framing. It’s beautifully shot and well uses Nolan’s characteristic narrative contrivances (the three timelines on different scales) without going overboard into Inception-y territory. The Cillian Murphy not-all-heroes-are-heroes narrative was a little bit ham-fisted and Hardy wearing a mask that covered the lower half of his face the whole time was a little bit too clever, but generally a great film.
I didn’t care for Dunkirk at all. I thought its tight focus on relatively few characters lost the expansive scale of the actual event. It was to the point where you’d think that the two Spitfires were the only British planes involved in the entire enterprise. And I also think this was one story where Nolan’s shifting timelines worked against his movie. The script kept losing any narrative drive it had.
It needed an epic scope. The Cornelius Ryan/Longest Day approach would have really suited the subject material, from a historicity standpoint. Vignettes, moving forward chronologically. Ensemble cast. Oh and you know, some Germans. For context? Getting inside the other side’s decision making process would have really helped in terms of history and dramatic tension.
