Me Too! I bought the DVD and watch it again every year or so.
“Saving Private Ryan” is entirely fictional. Obviously there actually was a World War II and a Normandy invasion, but the characters in the film (aside for Marshall’s little bit) and specific events are wholly made up.
I would say more “loosely based” than entirely fictional. Yes there was a guy who had two brothers die on D Day whose brother was shipped out. They took a bit of poetic license here.
If only watching the first half, I concur.
That poor PBY gets blasted in Tora, Midway, the miniseries Pearl, Baa Baa Blacksheep and many more!
I have not watched Band of Brothers but should, having heard only good things.
I’m not sure the gravamen of a good war movie is to be purely about war, or to provide an immersive experience. 1917 was immersive, but largely emphasized the tedium of war broken by the occasional horror. I’m looking forward to watching some of the movies mentioned I’ve never seen. There is also some agreement on the best ones (mentioned several times) and perhaps lessons to be learned from the fact no one mentioned things like Stripes or Private Benjamin.
I’ll second or third Blackhawk Down. I was recommended it by a friend who’d left the military not many years before that film was released, and she reckoned it was pretty realistic; it certainly felt it. The only caveat is that it really benefits from a big screen - I’m pretty sure anyone watching it on a laptop, say, would find it impossible to follow.
Das Boot made me hugely sympathetic to the grunts working for the enemy just because they were born at a certain time in a certain place. It’s gripping - almost like a thriller, but in a subtle way.
My own favourite war movie is Empire of the Sun. It’s gorgeous to look at (and war can be, in a purely aesthetic sense), Christian Bale is absolutely astounding, and everyone else brings their A-game - and, despite being Spielberg, it doesn’t shy away from showing how the war affected people. It doesn’t throw it in your face, but that can be more effective. For example, Miranda Richardson’s character’s decline is anything but sentimental.
That’s on my list. Excellent movie.
I also like Henry V
Guilty pleasure: Tora Tora Tora. I have a weakness for that super turkey.
Don’t know if it counts, but Schindler’s List
Probably an unpopular opinion but I feel Saving Private Ryan is very overrated. It is, in my opinion, schmaltzy in the same way most Spielberg movies are.
I will readily agree that the first twenty minutes are one of the best battle scenes ever filmed. Full credit to Spielberg for that.
But once that opening scene is done and Spielberg starts with the story, the movie goes way downhill. It’s not a movie about war. It’s about eight soldiers going out to find a ninth soldier. The rest of WWII is pretty much reduced to a background setting which has no importance to what we’re watching. Spielberg can’t handle big stories and when he tries, he ends up shrinking them down to small stories.
The Thin Red Line, which came out around the same time had its flaws. But Malick at least had a message about the nature of war that he was trying to convey: that war isn’t about a handful of men changing the course of history, war is about thousands of men being thrown together to win a battle and millions of men being thrown together to win a war and at that scale the actions of individuals doesn’t affect the outcome.
The P-51 flyby is absolutely thrilling!
Thank you. You phrased my exact thoughts much better than I could have.
They Were Expendable (1946) by John Ford starring John Wayne and Robert Montgomery legitimately surprised me in how great it was since I see so little people talk about it. It’s about a PT Boat squadron in the Invasion of the Philippines in 1941 and does an amazing job of showing the attrition and hopelessness that happens to soldiers in a desperate situation. No matter how many ships the PT boats sink, the Japanese inevitably keep advancing and the ending is bleak but hopeful since the audience knows eventually we won the war, but the characters don’t know that yet.
By the way are there any good podcasts about war films? I tried listening to Friendly Fire but the hosts seemed too caught up on debating whether or not American GIs using the word “Japs” in a WW2 movie is racist or not than actually talking about the movie.
Not a war movie exactly but this sequence from “Children Of Men” is pretty intense.
I actually agree with you, but that opening scene is so good I still think its in the running for best war film. I’m not sure what else comes close to that opening scene.
One really top notch battle scene was in the 1978 version of The Four Feathers (this is one others have mentioned in this thread). It was a made-for-tv movie and you would expect them to cut some corners. But they had a very well-done scene of a detachment of British soldiers being ambushed and overrun by Sudanese Mahdists. (I will add that the rest of the movie was excellent and I recommend it. The battle scene I’m referring to starts around the forty-two minute mark.)
This gets my vote for “best movie about the army during the Vietnam War”, for sure.
Black Hawk down gets my vote for “best movie about armed conflict in late 20th century Somalia”, no question.
I can’t really pick one “best war movie” because there are many different things to be examined in wars and sometimes the specific issues arising in one war are what the “war movie” is actually focused on. There are simply too many good stories set against the backdrop of organized armed conflict for me to call one of them “best”.
Best anti-war movie I have seen is All Quiet on the Western Front. But it also had a very definite anti-German point of view (not Germany as an ethnic group, but the culture of war and conquest that was endemic at the time).
The other best anti-war movie I have seen is Paths of Glory. But again, it was a very particular cultural mind-set, conveniently not American, that was at the heart of that film.
Perhaps better than both of those was The Grand Illusion. It was a French movie about French prisoners of war in WWI, and the relationships that developed between them and their German captors (or maybe just the German commander, I’m not sure). I saw it a long time ago. But I seem to remember it was heart-breaking, as a good anti-war movie should be.
I saw The Longest Day, as a young teen, four times the summer it came out (and I see it has been mentioned more than once already). It does give one to think by what a narrow margin that day went our way. What a chancy thing war is.
For a war film designed to buck up the home front, I think In Which We Serve is among the best. A British film about a ship, its captain and crew, and what they go through together. The best kind of propaganda.
Mention of King Rat reminded me of these three movies:
There is also this classic movie:
I can highly recommend the following as one of the best anti-war movies yet made:
It is absolutely devastating.