That wedding sequence took a psychological toll on me, I’ll tell ya!
Come and See is as Anti-War a movie as it gets.
I thought of this one. Everything about it is just misery and trying to find ways to not be there or diminish the effect of being there.
Then, they kill some girl at the end who also probably did not want to be there. The whole thing is “crap, we have to be here shooting, etc.”.
I’m glad you mentioned it. That moment where the girl realizes there is a pile of bodies and the boy doesn’t…wow. That moment where the soldiers throw a child back into the burning building to kill it…wow.
That final shot looking at the kid who saw everything…ugh.
Anti-war, indeed.
Another Kubrick film, Apocalypse Now, is an anti-war movie—but it’s not the standard “war is hell” theme, but rather “war is madness”, cranked to the Nth degree.
The source material (Heart of Darkness) was a little more “war is a slow hell”… I think the movie adaptation turned up the craziness a little more.
What would be the message of an “anti-war” movie?
-Pacifism is always the correct path?
-War can bring suffering that’s nearly beyond comprehension?
-Wars are often fought and sold for stupid/selfish reasons?
One could argue this is what How I Won the War tried to do, with emphasis on “beyond comprehension”.
For most of them, it usually feels like some variation of “Grunts on the ground don’t really know or care about the big picture whys and wherefores and are forced to dehumanize their opponents and themselves to kill indiscriminately, resulting in much personal tragedy upon a moment’s reflection in the trenches.”
In the “a million deaths is a statistic” sense, it’s probably hard to make a relatable film about the large-scale issues of war. Nobody wants to watch a UN meeting…
Does anyone remember the 1983 TV production The Day After? It was shown on TV in the USA, but on cinemas in Europe. I saw it in Berlin and I can tell you the mood when leaving the cinema was somber. People were shocked.
It is so long ago, I couldn’t tell you the details. I think it was not even a good™ movie. But anti-war? Yes, I think it was. It worked that way on us.
I strongly disagree. The opening of the movie depicts horror; it’s ending shows grace, in the religious sense. Glory is about as far from an antiwar movie as possible. I mean, it’s right there in the name!
Ralph Bakshi’s animated adaptation of The Butter Battle Book is a chilling parable of mutually assured destruction…for kids!
I don’t think most people, including myself, can be sold on pacifism (but I did not watch Gandhi — was it an anti-war movie?).
So anti-war movies might just be limited to saying “For Christ’s sakes, avoid war unless the results of not fighting will be truly terrible” or “Don’t let rich selfish bastards or fanatic idealists sell you a blood & shit bath.”
That is not a Kubrick film, but a Coppola film.
I was going to mention this.
Also Oh! What a Lovely War, which shows WWI through the metaphor of an amusement pier. No scenes of battles, but songs and bizarre images drenched in irony.
Maybe not outright pacifism, but it feels like the more recent (post-9/11) war movies ask some variation of “Was this particular war sensible? Was all this sacrifice worthwhile?”
In the WW2 era, it was hard to make an anti-war movie when the US defeated the Nazis and saved the world.
That became a lot easier with our forays into Afghanistan and Iraq, and especially with our subsequent withdrawals and abandonment of the locals. It’s easier to sell war as unnecessary tragedy when thousands of people die, weddings are bombed by remote control, mission accomplished and then a few years later it’s as if we were never there.
I can’t remember the particular titles right now, but I feel like that theme — “wtf was all that for” — is also reflected in some foreign films about the US involvement, told from the perspective of some of our allies. There was a sense of overall meaninglessness that WW2 obviously didn’t have. Maybe closer to Vietnam?
Hmm… not foreign, and it’s been a while, but I think The Outpost captured some of that feeling of “what the hell is all of this for”. It’s part spectacle, part jingoism, part reflection… like so many of the films about our misadventures there. Once in a while we have movies like Zero Dark Thirty that don’t really have much nuance, but many of the other ones do. Hurt Locker comes to mind too.
On a totally separate note, that does remind me of a nice, nuanced foreign film about post-WW2 Denmark, when a bunch of young German prisoners of war were forced to manually clear some of the minefields that their armies set: Land of Mine (2015) - IMDb
On one hand, they’re Nazis. On the other hand, they’re kids. Moral conflict ensues. It was a heart-wrenching movie.
The more recent Zone of Interest shows a Nazi family trying to live a “normal” life next to Auschwitz. No commentary on it; I fell asleep several times trying to watch it.
But Glory does literally glorify war through the sheer spectacle and self-sacrifice of the 54th’s ill-fated assault on Fort Wagner. That’s the problem with trying to make an anti-war movie. All the carnage and destruction is usually presented as a necessary evil to free people or prevent the spread of Nazi-ism. Particularly if it’s some strategically significant battle.
I think FMJ is a good example.
The first half is an obvious statement against war as it focusses on the dehumanization and institutional cruelty inherent to preparing men for war.
I’ve also always found the second half of the film interesting as a statement against war. It starts out mostly lighthearted with Joker and Rafterman carousing around Da Nang with the initial action being a typical big but largely one-sided set-piece battle at the start of the Tet Offensive.
Over the rest of the film, Joker’s experience with the violence of the war becomes closer and intimate, ultimately leading to his claustrophobic and strategically insignificant showdown with the teenage girl who killed his friend and half the squad.
Platoon is probably the best example of an anti-war film. The Americans are hardly the “good guys” and most aren’t even likeable. There is almost no action-movie heroics or glorious last stands. Even most of their down time consists of cleaning latrines and digging ditches. There’s nothing about Platoon that would make a reasonable person say “that looks like fun”.
Apocalypse Now fails as an anti-war film. The Flight of the Valkyries scene has basically become the standard trope for “helicopter air assaults are awesome!”.
From a humanitarian perspective, all war films with scenes of combat are necessarily anti-war films, including those that take a pro-war stance (e.g., The Green Berets and innumerable WWII programmers). War is hell and it is repulsive to watch the (recreated) deaths of human beings coming as a result of a failure to find compromise. Even in cases where the cause is just or conflict unavoidable (like WWII), exploiting war action for “entertainment” is obscene and should be discouraged, imo. We need more movies glorifying those who try to avoid war, successfully or otherwise.
I’d make an argument for The Hurt Locker (and probably most if not all movies involving Iraq and Afghanistan).