Summary War movies can realistically depict warfare by focusing on the perspectives of soldiers themselves or by using handheld cameras for a documentary-like feel.
Realistic war movies capture the horrors of war while still being cinematically engaging, such as Hacksaw Ridge, Lone Survivor, and Saving Private Ryan.
Directors like Christopher Nolan and Steven Spielberg have successfully recreated war with a sense of realism, immersing the audience in the harrowing experience.
From the evacuation in Dunkirk to the burning of the church in Come and See, some of the best scenes from war movies have a harrowing sense of realism. The inherent spectacle of cinema means that it’s difficult to make a war film that accurately depicts the horrors of warfare without turning the firefights and foot chases into action-packed Hollywood entertainment. But the very best filmmakers, from Stanley Kubrick to Steven Spielberg to Ridley Scott, have managed to present scenes of war in a way that is both cinematically engaging and hauntingly realistic.
War movies can replicate warfare realistically by focusing on the perspectives of the soldiers themselves, like in Hacksaw Ridge and Black Hawk Down, or by using handheld cameras for a documentary-like feel, like in Lone Survivor and Saving Private Ryan. It’s famously impossible to make a true anti-war film, because any cinematic depiction of war is bound to be exhilarating for the audience. But, in the hands of a great director like Christopher Nolan, it is possible to capture a realistic recreation of war.
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10 The Battle Of Okinawa In Hacksaw Ridge
Hacksaw Ridge puts a spotlight on a conscientious objector, Desmond Doss, who became a war hero by saving lives, not taking them. Andrew Garfield gives a fully convincing Oscar-nominated performance in the role of Doss. The biopic culminates in the Battle of Okinawa, the battle that earned Doss a Medal of Honor, as its climactic sequence. Doss rescued an estimated total of 75 men during the Battle of Okinawa. Mel Gibson’s cinematic retelling of this battle exaggerates the size of the cliff for dramatic effect, but everything else is spot-on.
9 The Mountainside Firefight In Lone Survivor
Despite giving away the ending in its title, Peter Berg’s Lone Survivor is a riveting thriller dramatizing the failed counter-insurgent mission Operation Red Wings from the War in Afghanistan. Mark Wahlberg stars as a Navy SEAL whose four-man team is sent to fight Taliban forces in the Korangal Valley. The film’s action kicks off when the SEALs are swarmed by Taliban fighters during their journey up a mountain. Berg used digital cameras for the first time in his career, because these lightweight devices allowed the camera operators to move quickly and smoothly to follow the action – especially in the jaw-dropping mountainside firefight.
8 Trench Warfare In 1917
Sam Mendes’ 1917 is notable for its long-take gimmick, as all its shots are edited together to look like one continuous two-hour take, but it’s also an impressively realistic portrayal of trench warfare in World War I. The movie’s signature single-take style makes the scenes in the trenches more immersive than the average war film. In particular, 1917 gives viewers a detailed depiction of the differences between the British and German trenches. German trenches were typically deeper and more heavily reinforced than British trenches, and 1917 captures that with startling accuracy.
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7 The Suicide Mission In Paths Of Glory
The majority of Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory is an anti-war rallying cry about a noble individual taking on a corrupt institution. Kirk Douglas stars as Colonel Dax, who has to defend his decision to defy a direct order and save his men from embarking on a suicide mission. At the beginning of the movie, Dax’s men are seen heading out to their deaths before retreating under heavy fire. Kubrick’s minimalistic coverage of this scene allows the terror of venturing across no man’s land under fire to speak for itself.
6 Delta Force Soldiers Vs. Aidid’s Militia In Black Hawk Down
From shaky camerawork to frenzied cutting, Ridley Scott used every cinematic trick in the book to disorientate his audience in the gritty, visceral combat scenes of Black Hawk Down. When a Delta Force squadron is deployed to capture Mohamed Farrah Aidid in Mogadishu, Aidid’s militia won’t let them take him without a fight. As the ground convoy takes heavy fire from the militia, Scott refuses to turn the film into a spectacle and remains empathetically focused on the soldiers and their perspective. The frantic editing captures the chaos of a warzone.
5 The NVA Assault In Platoon
Oliver Stone’s Platoon was the first Vietnam War movie from a big Hollywood studio to be directed by an actual veteran of the war. Stone made Platoon as a counterargument to falsified Hollywood myths about the war and based a lot of the scenes in his script on real experiences he had in Vietnam. For the shocking scene in which the titular platoon’s defensive lines are broken during an attack by the North Vietnamese Army, Stone drew from the real terror he felt in similar situations to show the audience what war is really like.
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4 Burning The Church In Come And See
Elem Klimov’s notorious Come and See is one of the most grueling war movie experiences of all time. It depicts Nazi atrocities and intense human suffering during the German occupation of Belarus, all shown through the eyes of a traumatized Belarusian teenager. There’s no scene in this movie that’s easy to watch, but one that’s particularly difficult to watch is when Nazis lock a group of Belarusian children inside a church and then light it on fire. Flyora’s horror at the sight of this scene is matched only by the audience.
3 The Evacuation In Dunkirk
Christopher Nolan avoids using CGI wherever possible, so his portrayal of warfare is one of the most realistic ever put on film. When he set out to dramatize the evacuation of Dunkirk in his aptly titled World War II thriller Dunkirk, Nolan essentially restaged the entire thing and simply set up cameras around it to capture the action. Nolan covers the evacuation from three different perspectives – the land, the air, and the sea – through the eyes of three characters who, while fictional, could easily be real troops. Hoyte van Hoytema’s camera mimics the eyeline of a soldier witnessing these shocking events.
2 Taking Out The Sniper In Full Metal Jacket
The final set-piece of Kubrick’s darkly comedic Vietnam War epic Full Metal Jacket sees Joker’s unit taking down a sniper, only to find that the sniper is a teenage girl. Animal Mother agrees to answer the girl’s pleas for death and end her suffering, but he forces Joker to deliver the coup de grâce. Joker is the only main character in Full Metal Jacket to survive to the end credits, but he’s not exactly lucky. As horrific as it is to die on the battlefield, the true horror of war is having to live with having done something as traumatic as mercy-killing a teenager.
1 The D-Day Landings In Saving Private Ryan
Steven Spielberg’s recreation of the D-Day landings in Saving Private Ryan was so realistic that it triggered PTSD attacks in real veterans who were on the beaches of Normandy (via War History Online). From Tom Hanks’ uncontrollably shaking hands to the blood washing up on the shore, Spielberg’s attention to detail brings this sequence to life with haunting precision. The handheld cameras and their spontaneous coverage of the action give this scene a documentary-like sense of realism, and Spielberg takes the time to show the moral gray areas on both sides of the conflict.
Source: War History Online