The war genre is as flooded as the Western, but that only means there have been more opportunities to create masterpieces. Given the dynamics of the 20th century, World War II and Vietnam films dominate the genre. However, there are so many war films that cater to myriad tastes that making any such list is difficult. I’ve decided to focus on both my own experience with these stories and an informed comparative opinion of a genre full of great movies.
Each movie on this list has to stand out for representing the mores of the era in which it was produced. Not only that, but each movie had to connect to its contemporary culture while offering useful insights for the present. For me, this is a key test of time, not just that a story remains entertaining, but instructive.These movies remain so ingrained in my memory, and each entry has something important to say that has stayed with me since the very first viewing.
**Why You Should Trust Me: I’ve been writing about film history professionally for nearly two decades, both in and out of academic venues. My first interest in movie history was the evolution of genre, which keyed me into how and when a genre hits on all cylinders. Growing up in the ’80s, we got accustomed to jingoistic and simplistic war films, which made noticing the gems much easier in subsequent years. After watching ’80s mainstays Rambo: First Blood Part II and Missing in Action, which are entertaining but minimally serious, it was easy to see the choices below as special. I’ve created this list with a mix of historical insight coupled with personal experience growing up with this genre. Please share your favorites in the comments!
‘Three Kings’ (1999)
Americans Are Fish Out Of Water in this Quirky Middle East War Heist
I know, opening with a sleeper. 1999 was an absolute banger year for movies. So much so that some great films have been forgotten under the shadow of towering modern classics. Too many people have forgotten about Three Kings, but it was one of the first to really show how out of place U.S. soldiers were/are in the Middle East. In Three Kings, an oddball team of soldiers decides to steal some of Saddam Hussein’s gold.
The movie was also the first time I realized Mark Wahlberg, then mostly known as a pop star, could act. Three Kings is also Spike Jonze’s first film role, and many were trepidatious about his casting. Still, the movie is a modern classic that hits many notes, including the absurdity of war, the confusion of modern warfare, all while retaining a 94% critic approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
Watch This If: You want to see a film with some pre-9/11 clarity, when soldiers could openly ask “what are we doing here?”
Skip This If: You can’t stand Mark Wahlberg.
‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ (1930)
The Most Poetic of All War Films.
The poetic realism of All Quiet on the Western Front is nearly unrivaled. The way the combat boot is used as a visual metaphor for the loss of life and expendability of soldiers is profoundly moving. Based on German author Erich Maria Remarque’s popular novel of the same name, Universal Studios’ adaptation deeply angered the rising Nazi Party.
Interesting Facts: On December 5, 1930, soon-to-be Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels shut down a screening, calling All Quiet on the Western Front “a dirty film made in America!” The movie would win the Motion Picture Academy’s Outstanding Picture award, which was the precursor to what we now call Best Picture. It won’t surprise anyone to learn that after the Nazis took power, they quickly burned copies of Remarque’s novel and banned the film adaptation from playing in Germany.
Watch This If: You want to see a historically relevant story that still plays like a lightning rod today.
Skip This If: Poetic realism isn’t your jam.
‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ (1946)
A Moving Portrait of Men Coming Home From War
Arguably the most powerful film about coming home from war is this 1946 Best Picture winner. The story doesn’t skip out on realism as it does not shy away from PTSD, features a real World War II double-amputee, and covers a range of economic, romantic, and psychological tolls coming home from the battlefield after a number of years away. The story is both timeless and instructive for The Greatest Generation, many of whom went to war only to come home and bury their experiences.
For anyone my age, The Best Years of Our Lives is a useful tool in understanding our grandparents who fought in that war, each one dealing with that baggage differently. My grandpa was at the Battle of Okinawa, one of the ugliest battles in World War II, and somehow came home and weathered his experiences with success (at least on the outside). Others couldn’t return to any version of what life looked like before they left.
Watch This If: You want insight that most of The Greatest Generation were not able to offer at the time.
Skip This If: A slow-burn that is dialogue-heavy isn’t your version of a war film.
‘Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb’ (1964)
Stanley Kubrick Teaches Us That War is Dumb
It took Stanley Kubrick to show us how to poke fun at war in all of its lopsided logic. Sure, there have been war films with comedic elements, but nothing that cut as deep as Dr. Strangelove. When people think of Kubrick, it’s easy to go right to The Shining or Clockwork Orange or even another movie on this list, but we can’t forget just how good his early films truly were. The way Dr. Strangelove parodies political paranoia by turning the terrifying into a humorous delight is strikingly instructive today. It’s impossible to see the comedic machismo of Sterling Hayden as General Jack D. Ripper and not think of the contemporary shenanigans of many people in the halls of power today.
Watch This If: You need some humor to reignite the necessary sanity to prevail.
Skip This If: You prefer a jingoistic outlook on war that’s detached from the reality of armed conflict.
‘Casablanca’ (1942)
The Warner Bros. Classic on Love, Friendship, and Duty in Wartime
Casablanca is one of those movies that has been so entrenched in our social consciousness that it gets quoted without people even realizing that they are referencing this 1942 classic. A true tale of selfless action during wartime, Casablanca caught lightning in a bottle when the Epstein brothers wrote the script just prior to the Casablanca Conference in January 1943. Much of the cast were refugees from war-torn Europe.
The Epsteins didn’t particularly like the script they submitted, but the story hit a nerve in the middle of World War II, along with star-solidifying performances by Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman that enshrined them as Hollywood royalty forever. While often remembered as a love story, Casablanca is a layered narrative that explores the plight of innocent citizens during wartime. The struggle to flee fascism, to survive in occupied territory, to do the right thing, and, of course, the price of loyalty.
Interesting Facts: Warner Bros. production chief Jack Warner stole the Best Picture Oscar from Hal Wallis. I’ve written about the entire story for The Hollywood Reporter.
Watch This If: You want an uplifting tale about perseverance and selflessness.
Skip This If: You don’t enjoy great Golden Age cinema.
The Torture of War From Boot Camp to the Battlefield
By the 1980s, the Vietnam War film had started turning into straightforward action movies. The First Blood sequel, Rambo, as well as the Mission in Action trilogy, and others, started making war look exciting. Stanley Kubrick wasn’t about to let that happen. Even after Oliver Stone’s Platoon won the Best Picture statue in 1986, Kubrick was going to take the story a step darker by showing the unfortunate trajectory of soldiers from the hellish punishment of boot camp to the deadly daily experience of the battlefield.
R. Lee Ermey’s turn as the drill sergeant will never be forgotten. Matthew Modine as the soldier journalist Private Joker is eternally relatable as we see the entire story through his eyes. Joker sees the mistreatment in camp and the carnage in the war and struggles with how to process what he sees. His great exchange with a commanding officer about the “duality of man” has stuck with me since I first saw the movie in the mid 1990s. Joker’s helmet featured both a peace sign and the words “born to kill,” which is a perfect cross-section of America then and now.
Watch This If: You want a movie that truly stands out from other Vietnam War films.
Skip This If: You’ve been having a rough week. Watching this won’t help.
‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979)
Francis Ford Coppola’s Nearly Doomed Vietnam War Epic
“My film is not about Vietnam. It is Vietnam,” director Francis Ford Coppola told the Cannes Film Festival in 1979, “It’s what it was really like.” Apocalypse Now was arguably the craziest production in modern cinema history. Star Martin Sheen nearly died, tropical storms destroyed the sets, local armed forces kept pulling their helicopters off set for their own civil war, the director nearly lost his mind, and all of it was captured on home-video camera by Eleanor Coppola. A friend of mine was an attorney for United Artists during the production of Apocalypse Now and has assured me that “everything you’ve heard about that film is true.”
Loosely based on Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the story’s journey up the river through a raging war has some of the most incredible set pieces you’ll find in a war film. The jungle is real, the humidity and the bugs are real, the exhaustion is real, so we can understand why Coppola argued that his film “is Vietnam.” To top things off, Apocalypse Now has one of the most iconic endings delivered with Marlon Brando’s oft-quoted line, “the horror, the horror.” Not to mention the fabulous beach landing scene, with dialogue written by John Milius, who coined one of his most regularly quoted lines, “I love the smell of napalm in the morning.”
Interesting fact: Too many to list! Make sure to watch Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse, the documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now that features a wealth of footage from Eleanor Coppola. It’s just as great and entertaining as the film itself.
Watch This If: You want a movie experience you can feel in every bone.
Skip This If: Some gritty realism gets under your skin quickly. Much of what we see in this movie is really happening. Martin Sheen’s drug-induced breakdown that opens the film was exactly that. There’s also an animal sacrifice scene that isn’t easy to watch.
‘Schindler’s List’ (1993)
A Moving Tale About Survival and Subversion in Nazi Germany
Based on a true story of Oskar Schindler, a factory owner in Nazi-occupied Poland who hired Jews as a way to save them from the death camps. While the story comes from Thomas Keneally’s 1982 book Schindler’s Ark, Spielberg himself grew up being bullied as a Jewish kid and that informed how he mentally responded to learning about the Holocaust. The movie was shot in black and white, which was a risky move in an era where color film was the standard. Yet, the choice made sense considering the majority of the footage from the war was also in black and white, which tracked with our cultural memory of that period. Those who have seen the film know there is a very minimal use of color that, once seen, will never be forgotten.
Interesting Facts: Hollywood legend, Billy Wilder, whose family perished during the Holocaust, wanted to direct Schindler’s List. When he finally saw Spielberg’s version, he was so impressed that he was happy the job went to Spielberg instead. One thing that helped Spielberg and some crew members on such a dreary set is that they were also editing Jurassic Park at the same time they were filming Schindler’s List. Schindler saved about 1,200 Jews, and today there are now over 8,500 descendants alive thanks to his courage.
‘Saving Private Ryan’ (1998)
Steven Spielberg’s Ode to the Greatest Generation
I know, there were two Kubrick films and now two Spielberg movies back to back. There really is no avoiding Saving Private Ryan. The story opens with the most realistic battle sequence of all time with the recreation of the D-Day landing. The realism coupled with the Spielberg-style attention to humanity makes this film simultaneously terrifying and an absolute delight. It’s a war film with all the battle scenes one can handle yet still manages to find humor, humanity, and meditations on war throughout.
My first viewing was during the original theatrical release in a cinema packed with veterans. The mix of tension and therapeutic relief during certain scenes has stayed with me forever. Spielberg’s father was a World War II vet, and this story is his way of honoring that generation’s sacrifice for the greater good.
The story of a squad sent to find Private Ryan and return him home so his mother would not lose all her sons is inspired by the mythology from previous wars, but the tale needn’t be completely true to hit realistic notes about the complexity of war, loss, and understanding the mission in the moment.
Watch This If: You’re open to a roller coaster of excitement and emotion that is well worth it in the end.
Skip This If: You hate movies. Seriously, don’t skip this one.
‘The Mortal Storm’ (1940)
Authoritarianism Splits a Family Apart
It’s important to note that during Hollywood’s Golden Age, there were self-censorship rules against ridiculing other nations. This got tricky, of course, once Hitler and Mussolini came to power. After Warner Bros. broke the dam with Confessions of a Nazi Spy in 1939, other studios found the courage to produce some anti-Nazi films. The Mortal Storm was MGM’s adaptation of the novel by the same name. A prescient tale of a family grappling with authoritarianism.
A few years ago, I screened The Mortal Storm in a class on the history of censorship. Not knowing what the students would think, I was pleasantly surprised that after watching, they felt that they were present for some prewar debates in the United States. The Mortal Storm was a story that spoke to a moment in time, yet remains so powerful that it continues to be instructive and insightful during our current moment of immense polarization.
Interesting Facts: The Mortal Storm was one of the movies noted by a U.S. Senate subcommittee in early 1941 that launched an investigation into Hollywood for what they called “motion picture propaganda.” I’ve written the only book on the subject, titled Hollywood Hates Hitler.
This story originally appeared on Movieweb
