Content Warning: This article discusses suicide, abuse, murder, and sexual assault.
While war movies have been a staple of cinema for decades, the genre has been transformed over the years by daring directors who have sought to bring the brutal reality of armed conflict to the screen. War is, famously, Hell. However, a regular viewer of some war movies might reasonably be shocked to learn this fact. A great many war movies (some of which, surprisingly are among the genre’s most critically-adored efforts), depict war as a tragic but ultimately life-affirming struggle of good against evil. However, for as long as there have been propaganda movies designed to bolster public support for international adventurism, there have been radical war movies that reshaped the genre.
As far back as 1928’s Hell On Earth (a German anti-war movie about soldiers fighting the “common enemy: WAR”) and as recently as 2022’s All Quiet On the Western Front, the best war movies have used real-life conflicts to reflect the barbarism of war. Humanizing the soldiers and civilians killed in conflicts, these daring war movies offer an alternative cinematic image of war. From illustrating the callous cruelty of higher-ups to depicting the worst war crimes committed by soldiers often uncritically portrayed as heroes, these war movies took the jingoistic, patriotic conventions of the genre and turned them on their head to protest the normalization of permanent warfare.
7 Paths of Glory
The first of two Stanley Kubrick movies that challenged the conventions of the genre, Paths of Glory was a bracing corrective to the many movies that glamorized conflict in the years after WWII. Set during WWI, this 1957 war movie stars Kirk Douglas as Colonel Dax, a commanding officer of French troops who defends his unit against charges of cowardice when they fail to follow through with a suicidal mission. Where Kubrick’s 1980s war movie Full Metal Jacket took aim at the inhuman behavior of average foot soldiers, Paths of Glory instead focuses on the uncaring sadism of their commanding officers. In its bleak, realistic ending, Dax’s soldiers are executed.
6 Battle of Algiers
Gillo Pontecorvo’s Battle of Algiers is a fascinating early example of the docudrama format. Released in 1966, Battle of Algiers depicted the National Liberation Front’s fight for freedom against colonial French paratroopers. The cast of Battle of Algiers was composed of non-professional actors, many of whom were veterans of the real-life conflict. Battle of Algiers focuses mostly on the illegal torture that paratroopers committed while attempting to oppress the FLN, but the movie doesn’t shy away from the violence involved in the FLN’s campaign of resistance. While many fictional war movies like Jarhead and 1917 gesture toward realism, Battle of Algiers was a truly radical melding of real-life history and fictionalization.
5 Apocalypse Now
Released in 1979, director Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now was met with mixed reviews upon release. In retrospect, it is easy to see why. This war movie redefined the genre by approaching the Vietnam war not as a dramatic conflict between nations, but as an internal battle for the souls of two American soldiers. A loose, psychedelic reworking of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Apocalypse Now transported the novella’s action from the colonized Congo to America’s invasion of Vietnam. While the movie may not be based on a true story, Apocalypse Now's depiction of an innocent narrator realizing he is complicit in atrocity rang true for a generation.
4 Come and See
Apocalypse Now loosened the definition of a “war movie,” offering a stranger, trippier alternative to traditional depictions of conflict. 1985’s Come and See took this approach further, depicting the invasion of Belarus by Nazi forces in a hallucinatory tour de force that blended horror imagery, fantasy iconography, and even sci-fi elements to translate the horrors of war onto the screen. Young Florya’s experience of his hometown’s destruction is a nightmarish ordeal that extends past realism and into the world of the symbolic. Despite this, Come and See is less a cerebral art piece and more of a brutal endurance test that makes the horrors of war hit home harder than ever.
3 Platoon
A year after Come and See, writer/director Oliver Stone’s Platoon took the opposite approach to the war movie and arrived at the same conclusion. Like Come and See, Platoon depicts war as a degradation of the human spirit that is devoid of heroism. Unlike Come and See, Platoon uses accurate real-life detail to achieve this. Based on Stone’s experience as an infantryman, Platoon sees the idealistic Chris (a career-best Charlie Sheen) lose his innocence as he is exposed to the incompetence and corruption of his soldiers and officers. Famous for the image of the squad’s lone good man being shredded by machine-gun fire, Platoon depicted war as an unambiguous horror show, becoming one of the most realistic war movies in the process.
2 Full Metal Jacket
While Apocalypse Now made the subject of war more personal and Platoon stripped the war movie of its naive heroism, patriotism, and optimism, Full Metal Jacket took this approach full circle. Kubrick’s blistering Full Metal Jacket redefined the genre by spending most of its runtime in basic training. A blackly comic shaggy dog story, the first half of Full Metal Jacket sees R. Lee Ermey’s ruthless drill sergeant hone Vincent D’Onofrio’s Private Lawrence into the perfect killer. Lawrence is relentlessly ostracized, bullied, and brutalized by the Sergeant’s campaign of psychological and physical torture, but this approach does turn D’Onofrio’s “Gomer Pyle” into an accomplished marksman.
Lawrence then murders the drill sergeant before turning his rifle on himself. With this mid-way twist, Full Metal Jacket strips the war movie of any remaining glamor or heroism. While the later Casualties of War would depict the real-life assault of a Vietnamese civilian by American soldiers, Full Metal Jacket was the first war movie to suggest that the soldiers who served in Vietnam weren’t the heroes of their own story. For all of Apocalypse Now’s long journey into the heart of the conflict, Full Metal Jacket was the anti-war movie that showed viewers there was no heart at the core of war.
1 Redacted
Directed by Casualties of War’s Brian De Palma, 2007’s under-seen Redacted was an intense, unforgettable Iraq war movie. One of the earliest found-footage war movies, Redacted tells a fictionalized version of the Mahmudiyah rape and killings, a war crime that involved a group of US soldiers sexually assaulting a 14-year-old child before murdering her and her family. Redacted’s unsparing adaptation of this incident led to boycotts and bad reviews, although Redacted’s revolutionary use of the found footage format did earn praise from critical luminaries such as Roger Ebert and John Pilger. Redacted brought war movies into the twenty-first century with a style that made war’s horrors all the more palpably real.