Perhaps marginally trailing love, war has remained a top fascination for filmmakers, almost since the birth of cinema itself. Directors love depicting war because it can be many things all at the same time. War is, at once, a macro geopolitical shift and an intimate human tragedy. It’s both honourable and disgusting, simple and infinitely complex. Of course, in the wrong hands, war movies can be, ironically, quite dull (War Horse, Hacksaw Ridge) — or worse: cynical, propaganda exercises (American Sniper, Lone Survivor).
However, there have been many depictions of war that have stuck the landing and, in doing so, approached the subject in wildly divergent ways. Many of the following entries question the morality at the heart of war and how it can be bent and reshaped. But they encompass other themes too, such as the brutal hubris of idealism and power. Some of these are terrifying. Some, conversely, are quite beautiful.
10. Alexander (2004)
Oliver Stone’s epic, Alexander, makes the list purely due to its pedantic dedication to historical accuracy, a standard which most war movie directors are happy to skimp on. Stone, however, really leaned into the nerdiness and pedantry here and credit to him. Before shooting the movie, the director went on a tour of the academy, consulting historians from Oxford and CUNY Queens College to make sure all the phalanxes and battle formations were exactly correct. Apparently, Eugene N. Borza, a professor lecturing on Ancient Macedon at Penn State called the film’s depiction of the battle of Gaugamela “impressive”, so, kudos Oliver.
9. Das Boot (1981)
This is as good as a five hour movie about Nazis in a submarine can possibly get. Based on a novel by Lothar-Günther Buchheim, Das Boot perfectly navigates the line between eerie tedium and gripping suspense. It’s all immensely claustrophobic, as you’d expect, with the broad global scope of World War II reduced to a couple of hundred metres inside a metal box under the sea. Probably best viewed in two sittings, but definitely worth the lengthy run time.
8. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
Yes, this film has a ‘not now grandad’ reputation, but look at it; it’s genuinely stunning. The film tells the story of T. E. Lawrence, a spiffing British former archaeologist who helped lead the Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire. The movie is immaculately shot by David Lean and cinematographer, Freddie A. Young, featuring some incredible wide shots of the Jordanian desert. The film swells with a brooding hallucinatory element, the heat-thickened air constantly dancing in the background somewhere. One scene, early in the film, featuring a faraway camel, is right up there with the most suspenseful sequences of any war film since.
7. Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
There are many ways for a movie to go about exploring Francoism, but few of them are likely to involve magical fauns. Nevertheless, in 2006, Mexican director, Guillermo del Toro, produced something remarkable. Pan’s Labyrinth is set on the frontiers of the Spanish Civil War, where an imaginative, yet troubled little girl, has been introduced to one of cinema’s worst step-dads: Captain Vidal, a sadistic Falagist officer. However, hidden beneath the brutal realities of the surface world, a buried magical kingdom prepares for the arrival of a lost princess. Pan’s Labyrinth shouldn’t work; the dark realism colliding with whimsy fairy-tale, should be discordant and jarring, but it just isn’t.
6. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Sure, not everyone remembers the second half of this film, but it doesn’t really matter, by then it’s already soldered into your brain. Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket is a truly unflinching vision of the US military machine: the sausage maker and the ground meat that comes out the other side. The movie also contains an extraordinary supporting role from R. Lee Ermey. Ermey was originally hired for technical support, but prior military experience helped him reach such operatic levels of offensive oratory that Kubrick couldn’t help but cast him as Sergeant Hartman. ”You had best square your ass away and start shitting me Tiffany cufflinks or I will definitely fuck you up!”
5. Waltz With Bashir (2008)
Bolstered by a dizzying score from Max Richter, Waltz With Bashir, recalls the experiences of the film's director, Ari Folman, a former IDF soldier whose involvement in the 1982 Lebanon war put him in close proximity to the Sabra and Shatila massacre. Folman’s film is about memory and the responsibility that comes with participating in war. Beautifully animated, Waltz With Bashir follows Folman as he attempts to piece back together what happened to him in 1982. There’s his own personal amnesia, but Folman also happens upon a strange form of national amnesia too, one that underpins a nation's reticence to comprehend the consequences of its own military policies.
4. Come and See (1985)
Probably the most terrifying movie ever made. Elem Klimov’s 1985 anti-war movie, Come and See — originally titled, Kill Hitler — follows a teenage boy named Flyora, who joins the Belarusian partisans during the Nazi occupation. The film has a unique way of entering under the viewer’s skin. You’ll see it in nightmares; not because of the gore or the scale of the atrocities depicted, but because of its oppressive, covertly surreal atmosphere. The movie almost killed its leading actor, a sixteen-year-old Aleksei Kravchenko, who returned to school with grey hair after the wrap date.
3. Ran (1985)
Aside from Rashomon, 1985’s Ran is probably Akira Kurosawa’s best-known work, certainly his most epic in scale. The film is largely viewed as his last great masterpiece and, like it’s monochromatic cousin, Throne of Blood, adapts a Shakespeare play to a contemporaneous historical Japan. The movie subtly extends the themes of King Lear and also features one of the most intense battle scenes put to cinema, beckoned in by a single line from the leading character, “We are in hell…” It’s been said that Ran looks like a moving painting, but it’s true, every frame feels like it was painstakingly composed inside a candlelit artist’s studio.
2. Apocalypse Now (1979)
Coppola's adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, has become potentially the most famous war film ever released. This stands to reason. Reading Conrad’s — surprisingly short — novel, you’d be forgiven for thinking it impossible to adapt. As Conrad said, he was trying to describe the “very essence of dreams”, but, with a cast and crew reeling from dysentery in the Philippines, Coppola somehow achieved the impossible. He brought Conrad’s masterpiece into a new era of LSD, pop music, chemical warfare and attack helicopters, whilst still maintaining the poetic abyss at the heart of the story.
1. The Battle of Algiers (1966)
The relevance of Gillo Pontecorvo’s The Battle of Algiers is perpetually borne back into the present. Starring — and produced by — members of the Algerian FLN, Pontecorvo’s 1966 release does something perilously brave; it reminds us of the horrors of French colonialism whilst simultaneously proving that suffering an unjust system is not a prerequisite for a group acting morally. Produced in the wake of liberatory struggles in Angola, Vietnam, Cuba and Latin America, The Battle of Algiers, is a true piece of anti-imperialist cinema, refusing to cede discursive territory in any direction and containing a full spectrum of ambiguous shades of grey.
