I’ve always held that the one great failing of nearly all anti-war films is that they focus on soldiers and fighting.
A movie like Grave of the Fireflies is one of the few films that really imparts an undeniable anti-war argument.
How about the 2014 movie American Sniper?
Starship Troopers is completely anti-war. It’s all satire about how absurd war propaganda and jingoism is.
It wasn’t particularly good at selling its intended message.
Choosing to have actually revolting non-human adversaries puts that story on an entirely different footing.
Me against my brother. My brother and me against my family. My family and me against my country. My country and me against the foreigners. Humanity and me against The Bugs.
It’s a tired syllogism, but one with a lot of resonance with the typical conception of human nature.
Unrelated to the above I’ll suggest that Starship Troopers the book when it came out, the first movie when it came out, and how that movie is perceived in amped-up 2023 are three very different things. Over-the-top jingoism sells very differently to a populace who’re just getting used to peace again versus how it appears to a group being propaganda-whipped into a pre-war fervor.
Plus of course all the spin-off stories with their various takes on what parts of the story are satire and which are not.
I won’t deny that some people didn’t catch on to the SS uniforms, brainwashing, propaganda videos, medical experimentation on POWs, etc. I’m just surprised whenever someone shows up and admits it. I’m not a fan of Verhoeven and the rest of his satire because it’s too subtle, but he brought out the broad side of the barn to hit people with on this one.
Many of those listed so far I wouldn’t consider pro-war so much as pro-soldier. There is a big difference in my opinion.
A good try, but “12 Strong” was released in 2018, making it “the latest” I’m aware of. Can’t get more “pro war” than the true story of Chris Hemsworth leading a team of Special Forces soldiers on horseback to single-handedly defeat the Taliban so badly in the opening days of the War on Terror, it would take them nearly 20 years to recover. 
I had heard that sentiment before that it is really difficult to create a true “anti-war” movie because the spectacle of war and heroic actions tend to overshadow any anti-war sentiment.
How so?
I think the brilliance of Apocalypse now is how it sort of turns the typical war movie narrative upside down. Most war films build up to a big climatic battle. They might try to effect some anti-war message through conveying the violence and horror of war, but ultimately it becomes a message of supreme sacrifice to win a battle that needed to be fought.
Apocalypse Now has it’s traditional big set piece battle in the beginning with the whole “Ride of the Valkyries” air assault / surf sequence that kicks off Capt Willards road trip (boat trip). It’s exciting and absurd. But from that point forward, Willard’s journey gets darker and more surreal and insane as he gets closer to Col Kurtz.
I think the main message of Apocalypse Now is that war is simply wholesale murder based on some arbitrary rules or criteria set by far-off politicians to further some agenda. Yes, Kurtz is an insane and broken man, but is his “freelancing” really any different from Col Kilgore and his Air Cavalry squadron? Or is it just “presentation”?
All Quiet On The Western Front (both the 1930 original movie and the book it was based on) had a grim view of war. I haven’t seen any remake.
If critics get it into their heads that any sympathetic portrayal of soldiers in a movie makes it “pro-war”, that seems delusional.
Now, a movie like The Green Berets essentially had the message “this war is worth fighting and we can win if we just support our troops”, which made it unabashedly pro-Vietnam War.*
*“The Ballad of the Green Berets” was almost antiwar in comparison to “The Battle Hymn of Lt. Calley”.
Full Metal Jacket
The Boys In Company “C”
I think the critic is wrong. I also think Verhoeven should be fed to a pack of rabid marmots.
I don’t think it was intentional, but I don’t think any creator gets to decide the meaning of the thing they create. That’s what I get to do. And you asked so:
As many know, Apocalypse Now was a reimagining of many of the ideas explored in Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. In the book the protagonist goes up the Congo into the interior looking for his man and while he does this the scene around him changes and it in turn changes him. HOW it changes and WHY is the book, and would have been the film.
In the book it is made clear the river is in fact time and the journey up it is a trip back through time. The issue with that is the farther you go the more primal it not only gets but the more primal you need to BE to exist there.
Francis Ford Coppola’s mess is colorful, it’s also artful. I appreciate what he did with light and sound to create an outerworldy mood. That’s great. It’s just not what the story is about. The scene with the French farmers was removed. That and other missing parts linking the original point to this war film are legion. So what we have is a colorful and bright war film. Sure, there are loads of anti-war messages in this film, but people quote the Napalm scene. And THAT is Jingoism.
Wait! This almost slipped past and I had to back up to read again.
Are you really saying that RoboCop and Showgirls were subtle?
Heh. RoboCop wasn’t, but I still don’t really know what the hell Showgirls was about. I never did rewatch it after my teenage self first saw it in the theater.
Which last comment inadvertently raises a point. As primed by things a couple folks said or almost said just upthread.
Watching e.g. Apocalypse Now recently as a 60-something I see the mindless violence, the needless death of good or at least innocent people on both sides, the growing insanity / psychopathy of Kurz, the sacrifice of Willard by quiche-eating Generals served on regimental ch ina, etc.
Watching e.g. Apocalypse Now back then as a 20yo I saw massed helicopter assaults set to cool music, irreverent but youthful older bosses with surfboards, macho dudes macho-ing, cool explosions, and useless villagers of indifferent ethnicity dying in entertaining ways. With a side order of fat cats in the rear orchestrating all the mayhem in genteel surroundings; demonstrating pure power qua power and with great gouts of admirable sang froid.
The film both times is the same. I both times am the “same”, net of 45 years and my own almost decade as a military combat officer. The story told however, is utterly different. Or at least the story as heard is totally different.
The audience matters. Critically so.
I think that’s the point I was trying to make. The film starts out with “war” as these fat cats moving pieces on a board from their air conditioned offices and cool macho war machines raining fire down on enemy villages. Yes, there are some friendly casualties, but it’s all very distant and detached. But each step on their journey, the realities of war are more immediate and more personal.
Full Metal Jacket follows a similar pattern in expressing the horrors of war. There’s no big glorious battle at the end like in more traditional films. Joker’s journey in combat begins with defending his base during the Tet Offensive. He’s in a prepared fortified position, surrounded by his squad mates, firing at distant shapes making a suicidal charge across open terrain. As far as firefights go, it’s relatively low risk and removed from the consequences of his actions. As Joker’s journey continues, his world becomes more claustrophobic and the fighting more intense and personal until it’s just him and a sniper in a small enclosed space. There isn’t even the satisfaction of any kind great victory, other than getting to live another day.
You are right, up until the stupid tacked on ending. The first day of the battle could be looked at as a victory. A smaller force took on and held its objectives against a larger force but it certainly wasn’t the decisive victory the movie shows.
In its favor it does show opposing solders and does not demonize them or dehumanize them. It doesn’t make the argument the war was a good thing.
What the movie failed to do was show the second half of the battle that happened with a different battalion in the regiment. That did not go so well.
Knowing who the real life people were I think the movie does a decent job of portraying them.
Personally I feel Apocalypse Now is best viewed as a metaphor for America’s involvement in Vietnam. It was about how we only had a vaguely defined goal which we didn’t really know how to achieve. And that as we traveled further down the river (got more involved in the war) we just became more dehumanized by our experiences and more confused about what we trying to do.
It wasn’t about seeing the girl from Saved By the Bell naked?
Pro-War? The movie where Paul loses his father and his best friend? And in the second movie, if it follows the book, the one where Paul laments that there’s nothing he can do to stop the coming jihad that will result in the deaths of billions? It doesn’t seem pro-war to me.