10 War Films That Are Perfect From Start to Finish
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War movies are tough to rate, because the best ones aren’t fun to watch any way. You don’t finish them feeling pumped up, you finish them quiet, maybe a little shaken, and you sit there for a minute before you say anything. That’s the kind of movie I wanted for this list, the ones that stay serious from the first minute to the last (and make you suffer somehow).
The movies mentioned here cover six decades and about as many wars as you can fit into ten films, from the trenches of World War I to the jungles of Vietnam and the burned villages of Belarus. A few are famous for their battle scenes, but what makes them hold up is how much attention they pay to the emotional quotient of people involved in war. So, let’s have a look.
10
‘The Bridge on the River Kwai’ (1957)
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Image via Columbia Pictures</figure>
Colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness), a stiff-upper-lip British officer, marches his men into a Japanese prison camp in Burma, where the commander, Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa), orders them to build a railway bridge for the enemy. Nicholson insists on doing the job properly to prove British discipline, and his pride slowly blurs the line between honor and madness. Shears (William Holden), an American who escapes the camp, gets dragged back to blow up the same bridge. David Lean directed The Bridge on the River Kwai, and it won seven Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Actor for Guinness.
The bridge was built for the film in Sri Lanka by hundreds of workers and took about eight months, and the final explosion, with a real train, was shot in a single take. Pierre Boulle, who wrote the novel and never spoke English, took the Oscar for the screenplay. The real writers, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, had been blacklisted in Hollywood, and the Academy only gave them credit decades later. The whistled “Colonel Bogey March” stays in your head for days.
9
‘The Deer Hunter’ (1978)
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Image via Universal Studios </figure>
Michael (Robert De Niro), Nick (Christopher Walken), and Steven (John Savage) are steelworkers in a small Pennsylvania town, and the first hour of The Deer Hunter is a long wedding party and a deer hunting trip before they ship out to Vietnam. Michael Cimino takes his time on purpose, so by the time the three are captured and forced to play Russian roulette, you’re already attached to them. Meryl Streep plays Linda, a woman caught between two of the men. The film won Best Picture, and Walken won Best Supporting Actor.
John Cazale, who plays Stan, was already seriously ill with cancer during the shoot, and this was his last film. The slap De Niro gives Walken in the roulette scene was reportedly real, and Walken’s face shows it. The Russian roulette scenes aren’t based on any documented real events, which sparked a lot of debate. But the film isn’t about facts, it’s about what war does to friends who thought they’d always have each other.
8
‘All Quiet on the Western Front’ (2022)
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Image via Netflix</figure>
Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), a German teenager, signs up to fight in 1914 with his classmates, fed on promises of glory, and quickly finds himself in the mud and rain of the Western Front. Edward Berger directed All Quiet on the Western Front, the first German-language adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque‘s 1929 novel. Kammerer was a stage actor with almost no film experience, and Berger cast him after a long search. Kat (Albrecht Schuch), an older soldier, becomes Paul’s guide and friend.
Volker Bertelmann‘s score uses a harsh three-note motif that hits like a drum in your chest. The film won four Oscars, including Best International Feature and Best Cinematography. The Nazis burned Remarque’s novel, which tells you how much they feared its message. The 1930 adaptation won Best Picture, and this version honors it by telling the story with the same heartbreak, minus the glamour.
7
‘The Thin Red Line’ (1998)
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Image via 20th Century Studios</figure>
Terrence Malick hadn’t made a film in twenty years when he came back with The Thin Red Line, set on Guadalcanal in 1942. The story follows an American infantry company as it fights its way up a hill, with voiceovers from soldiers like Private Witt (Jim Caviezel), a quiet deserter who keeps noticing the beauty of the island, and First Sergeant Welsh (Sean Penn), a cynical veteran. Lt. Col. Tall (Nick Nolte) pushes the men forward with a ruthless ambition.
Malick shot hours of footage and cut many actors’ roles down to almost nothing. Adrien Brody was promoted as a lead and ended up with only a few lines, while others, including Mickey Rourke and Gary Oldman, were removed from the finished film entirely. Hans Zimmer wrote a haunting score that still gets copied in trailers. It earned seven Oscar nominations and won none, which is a shame.
6
‘Das Boot’ (1981)
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Image via Neue Constantin Film</figure>
The Captain (Jürgen Prochnow) leads a German U-boat crew out of port in 1941 on a mission to sink Allied ships in the Atlantic, and a young war correspondent, Lieutenant Werner (Herbert Grönemeyer), rides along to write about it. Wolfgang Petersen directed Das Boot, based on Lothar-Günther Buchheim’s novel, and the film is set on a real submarine, U-96. The enemy is mostly unseen, and the dangerous part of it comes from water, the pressure, and the claustrophobia.
The film was shot in chronological order inside a life-size replica of the sub, and the actors were kept out of the sun so they’d look pale and worn. Cinematographer Jost Vacano ran through the narrow corridors with a handheld camera, which puts you right in the crew’s boots. It earned six Oscar nominations, and Grönemeyer went on to become one of Germany’s biggest pop stars. The scene where the boat sinks to the seabed and the hull groans under the pressure is almost unbearably tense.
5
‘Lawrence of Arabia’ (1962)
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Image via Columbia Pictures</figure>
T.E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole), a young British officer, is sent into the Arabian desert during World War I and he ends up uniting rival tribes to fight the Ottoman Empire. David Lean shot Lawrence of Arabia in 70mm across Jordan, Morocco, and Spain, and its desert vistas still look amazing on a big screen. O’Toole was a little-known stage actor when he got the part after Albert Finney turned it down, and the role made him a star. Sherif Ali (Omar Sharif) is introduced as a speck in the heat shimmer that slowly grows into a rider, in a long, slow shot.
The famous match cut goes from Lawrence blowing out a match to the sun rising over the desert, and it’s one of the best transitions in cinema. The film won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, and Steven Spielberg and Martin Scorsese helped restore it in 1989. Prince Faisal (Alec Guinness) and Auda Abu Tayi (Anthony Quinn) round out a cast that treats the story with the seriousness it deserves. It runs nearly four hours, and few films have earned their length more.
- The first film not in the English language to win Best Picture, in the Academy’s
92-year history to that point. - It took four Oscars in one night: Picture, Director, Original Screenplay and International
Feature. - It won the Palme d’Or at Cannes in 2019 by a unanimous jury vote, the first Korean film
to do so. - The Park family’s modernist house was not a location. It was built from scratch on an
outdoor lot.
- Seven Oscars, including three acting wins for Michelle Yeoh, Ke Huy Quan and Jamie Lee
Curtis. - Michelle Yeoh became the first Asian woman to win Best Actress.
- The visual effects were handled by a team of fewer than ten people, most of them
self-taught. - Ke Huy Quan had all but left acting for two decades before this role brought him back.
- Seven Oscars, including Nolan’s first wins for directing and for Best Picture.
- Cillian Murphy and Robert Downey Jr. both took their first Academy Awards for it.
- Kodak engineered a black-and-white 65mm stock that did not previously exist so Nolan could
shoot those sequences on IMAX. - A three-hour, R-rated drama about theoretical physics that passed 950 million dollars
worldwide.
- Four Oscars, among them Best Picture and Best Director for Iñárritu.
- Emmanuel Lubezki’s win here was the middle of three consecutive cinematography Oscars,
after Gravity and before The Revenant. - Antonio Sánchez’s improvised drum score was ruled ineligible for the score category,
which caused a minor uproar. - The long-take illusion was built from a handful of extended shots joined by hidden cuts.
- Four Oscars: Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, and Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem.
- Adapted from Cormac McCarthy’s 2005 novel, with much of his dialogue carried over
intact. - Carter Burwell’s score runs about sixteen minutes and is nearly inaudible by design.
- Roger Deakins was nominated twice that year, for this and The Assassination of Jesse James,
and won for neither.
4
‘Paths of Glory’ (1957)
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Image via United Artists</figure>
In 1916, a French general orders an impossible attack on a heavily defended German position, and when his troops fail, he demands that three random soldiers be executed for cowardice. Colonel Dax (Kirk Douglas), a lawyer in civilian life, defends them in a sham court-martial, while General Mireau (George Macready) and General Broulard (Adolphe Menjou) play politics with their lives. Stanley Kubrick directed Paths of Glory when he was only 28, and the film is based on a novel by Humphrey Cobb.
The trench scenes use long tracking shots that make you feel like you’re walking beside the soldiers. German police officers were used as extras for the attack scenes. The film was banned in France until 1975 because it criticized the army. The last scene, in which a German girl sings to rowdy soldiers, is played by Susanne Christian, who later became Kubrick’s wife. It’s short, bitter, and cold.
3
‘Saving Private Ryan’ (1998)
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Image via DreamWorks Pictures</figure>
Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) and his squad are sent behind enemy lines after D-Day to find Private Ryan (Matt Damon), whose three brothers have all been killed in action. The opening 24 minutes recreate the landing at Omaha Beach, shot handheld with washed-out colors to resemble real wartime footage. Steven Spielberg used about a thousand extras, including members of the Irish Army Reserve, for Saving Private Ryan. The scene reportedly cost over $11 million and still looks brutal.
The actors went through a week of military boot camp led by Captain Dale Dye, a former Marine, and Damon was kept out of it so the others would resent him on screen. Sergeant Horvath (Tom Sizemore), Reiben (Edward Burns), and Upham (Jeremy Davies) fill out the squad, and each gets a moment that matters. Spielberg won Best Director, but the film lost Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love, an upset which people still argue about.
2
‘Apocalypse Now’ (1979)
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Image via United Artists</figure>
Captain Willard (Martin Sheen) is sent up a river in Vietnam to find and kill Colonel Kurtz (Marlon Brando), a decorated officer who has gone rogue and set himself up as a god in the jungle. Francis Ford Coppola based Apocalypse Now on Joseph Conrad’s novella Heart of Darkness, and the shoot in the Philippines turned into a disaster. A typhoon destroyed sets, the schedule ran more than a year over, and Sheen suffered a heart attack. Harvey Keitel was originally cast as Willard, but Coppola fired him after two weeks.
Brando showed up overweight and hadn’t read the book, so Coppola had to improvise Kurtz’s scenes. Lt. Col. Kilgore (Robert Duvall), the surfing helicopter commander, steals the first half, and Laurence Fishburne, who plays Clean, was only fourteen on set yet managed to give the best performance of her life.
1
‘Come and See’ (1985)
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Image via Sovexportfilm</figure>
Come and See takes place in Belarus in 1943, when a teenage boy, Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko), digs up a rifle and joins the partisans, ignoring his mother’s pleas. He soon witnesses horrors that age him far beyond his years. Elem Klimov spent about eight years fighting Soviet censors to get the film made, and it was shot in chronological order so Kravchenko’s performance would change naturally. The title comes from the Book of Revelation.
Stories about the shoot say Kravchenko worked with a hypnotist to handle the most intense scenes, and that real ammunition was fired near him for realism, though accounts differ. Glasha (Olga Mironova), a young girl Flyora meets, is the only bright spot for a while. Millions of viewers saw it in the Soviet Union, and it won the top prize at the Moscow Film Festival. It’s difficult to watch and impossible to forget, and that’s why it’s at number one.
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