War movies go wrong the second combat starts looking too clean. Real fear is uglier than that. It is waiting for an order you know is stupid. It is hearing somebody breathe beside you in the dark and realizing you are both pretending not to be terrified. It is discovering that bravery and stupidity can look identical from twenty feet away. That’s why Game of Thrones was such a hit.
The eight films on this list also understand that war is never one thing. It can be machinery, bureaucracy, madness, occupation, cowardice, obedience, boredom, terror, or a field full of men dying because somebody with cleaner boots decided the map needed changing. If you’re a fan of war films, lock in.
8
‘1917’ (2019)
Sam Mendes’s 1917 follows British soldiers Will Schofield (George MacKay) and Tom Blake (Dean-Charles Chapman), who are ordered to cross enemy territory during World War I and deliver a message stopping an attack that will otherwise send 1,600 men into a German trap. Blake’s brother is among those men, so the mission is immediately more personal than the military language surrounding it.
The film feels as if the camera has been physically attached to these two soldiers, and that decision could have been a gimmick in lesser hands. Instead, it becomes suffocating. There is no comfortable cut away from a corpse floating in mud or a collapsing building or Schofield waking in darkness and realizing he still has miles to go. The sprint across the battlefield, his body looking finished, all of it is amazing. Men are charging perpendicular to him, explosions are throwing dirt everywhere, and he keeps running because the message matters more than whether he has anything left. It’s a brilliant war film.
7
‘The Thin Red Line’ (1998)
The Thin Red Line follows an American Army unit fighting Japanese forces during the Guadalcanal campaign, moving among soldiers whose private thoughts reveal radically different relationships with fear, violence, nature, duty, and death. There is no single conventional hero holding the film together. Instead, men appear, vanish, die, endure, and think.
That is exactly what Terrence Malick, who helmed the film, wanted. A soldier can be crawling through grass toward a machine-gun nest while sunlight moves beautifully across leaves. Birds keep singing. Water keeps flowing. Nature is not impressed by what human beings are doing to one another. Witt (Jim Caviezel) keeps searching for some spiritual order inside all of it, while Welsh (Sean Penn) sees the world much more brutally. Their disagreement never gets resolved because the film does not believe war hands out philosophical answers. It gives you violence beside beauty and lets the contradiction sit there until it becomes unbearable.
6
‘Saving Private Ryan’ (1998)
The mission in Saving Private Ryan sounds almost absurd when Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) first receives it. He and a small squad must cross Nazi-occupied France after D-Day, find Private James Ryan (Matt Damon), whose three brothers have been killed, and send him home before his mother loses every son she has.
Before that mission even begins, though, Steven Spielberg makes you survive Omaha Beach with them. Men drown because their packs are too heavy. A soldier picks up his severed arm. Miller briefly loses his hearing and watches the beach move around him like some broken silent film. There is nothing triumphant in it. Later, when the squad starts asking whether one man is worth all the lives being spent to retrieve him, the movie becomes morally uncomfortable in exactly the right way. And then old Ryan stands at Miller’s grave decades later asking his wife if he has been a good man. That question is the entire movie. How do you live a life large enough to justify people dying so you could have it?
5
‘Das Boot’ (1981)
Wolfgang Petersen’s Das Boot traps a German U-boat crew inside the Atlantic during World War II, following them from long stretches of boredom into attacks, depth charges, mechanical failure, and the growing realization that the steel tube protecting them could become their coffin at any moment.
The film has this almost sadistic respect for confined space. Pipes are everywhere. Men climb over one another. Sweat, diesel, food, machinery, and bodies occupy the same few feet. When depth charges start exploding outside the hull, nobody has anywhere heroic to run. They wait. Bolts shake loose. Water appears where water absolutely should not be. Faces turn upward whenever the boat makes a new sound. That is where Das Boot becomes terrifying. The enemy is often invisible. Death announces itself through pressure, metal, and noise. By the time the crew finally sees open air again, you understand why simply standing under the sky can feel luxurious.
4
‘The Battle of Algiers’ (1966)
The Battle of Algiers dramatizes the Algerian struggle against French colonial rule in the 1950s, moving between members of the National Liberation Front, French forces, civilians, bombings, arrests, torture, and the increasingly brutal methods used by both resistance and occupation. The film is helmed by Gillo Pontecorvo and it’s directed with such documentary-like immediacy that portions still feel less “performed” than witnessed.
The sequence where three Algerian women change their appearance, pass French checkpoints, and carry bombs into civilian locations is horrifying. The film refuses to make the tension morally comfortable. You watch people laughing in cafés without knowing what has been placed near them. Then the explosions come. Later, French paratroopers use torture with bureaucratic efficiency while explaining why they believe it is necessary. The movie never lets procedure disinfect violence. Everybody has reasons. Bodies still end up on the ground. It’s flawless.
3
‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979)
Apocalypse Now is flawless in a different way. It sends Captain Benjamin Willard (Martin Sheen) upriver during the Vietnam War with orders to find and kill Colonel Walter Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a decorated American officer who has abandoned military command and created his own violent kingdom deep in Cambodia.
Calling what follows a “mission” barely survives the first hour. On top of that, the film comes from Francis Ford Coppola (The Godfather) and we know he leaves no crumbs. Then there’s the character of Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore (Robert Duvall) who launches an attack on Wagner because he likes the surfing conditions nearby. A USO show involving Playboy Playmates collapses into chaos. A bridge is rebuilt every night simply so command can claim the road remains open. The farther Willard travels, the less war resembles anything with an objective. By the time Kurtz begins talking in the darkness about horror, you understand why the film has spent so long stripping away normal logic. The nightmare is not that Kurtz went insane. It is how much of the world around him already was.
2
‘Come and See’ (1985)
Come and See follows Florya (Aleksei Kravchenko), a Belarusian teenager who digs up a rifle and eagerly joins Soviet partisans during the Nazi occupation, imagining that he is entering some kind of adventure. The film then watches that idea get annihilated.
There are faces in this movie I genuinely wish I could forget. Elem Klimov helmed this film back in 1985 but did it brilliantly and he keeps bringing the camera painfully close to Florya as the boy’s expression ages faster than his body. After an explosion destroys his hearing, the soundtrack becomes a high ringing drone and the world seems to move several feet away from him. Then comes the village massacre, where civilians are herded into a building and burned alive while German soldiers treat the event with grotesque casualness. By the end, Florya looks decades older than he did at the beginning. That transformation is the argument. War has not made him a man but has stolen the child and left somebody else wearing his face.
1
‘Paths of Glory’ (1957)
Paths of Glory begins when French General Mireau (George Macready) orders soldiers to attack a heavily fortified German position during World War I, despite knowing the assault is almost certainly suicidal. When the attack fails, three men are selected to stand trial for cowardice so the military can pretend the disaster resulted from weak soldiers rather than catastrophic leadership.The battle is almost secondary. What makes the film vicious is what happens afterward.
Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas) walks through trenches surrounded by frightened men, then later stands in a polished courtroom where their lives are being discussed as administrative inconveniences. The three defendants barely matter to the generals as individuals. They are examples. That is the obscenity. And then the film ends with something astonishingly tender. German singer Christiane (Susanne Christian) stands before a room of drunken French soldiers who initially mock her. She begins singing “The Faithful Hussar.” Slowly, the room goes quiet. Men start humming along. Some cry. They do not understand all the words. They do not need to. For a few minutes, the uniforms stop mattering and everybody in that room is simply homesick. Then the soldiers are ordered back to the front.
Paths of Glory
- Release Date
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October 25, 1957
- Runtime
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88 minutes
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Ralph Meeker
Cpl. Philippe Paris
