War movies have been popular since the start of cinema, and there have been some masterpieces released over the last 100 years. From the beginning, the Civil War and the American Revolution were popular even in the silent era. The real highlights started after World War I, when new wars made the stories more topical.
Throughout the years, the best of these movies featured the two World Wars, and the wars in Korea, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and even old wars from the American West. As the decades wore on over the last 100 years, and people learned more about the wars behind the scenes, war movies became in-depth masterpieces of cinema.
1930s – All Quiet On The Western Front (1930)
What made All Quiet on the Western Front such a brilliant and memorable war epic was that it was a World War I movie from the point of view of the German soldiers. Most war movies see Germans and Nazis as pure villains. However, this showed young men almost brainwashed into serving their country.
Germany banned All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque for years because of its negative outlook on the German war effort. The movie, released in 1930, also ended up banned in Germany because Adolf Hitler opposed the film’s depiction of war.
The Rotten Tomatoes score for this war movie is 98%, thanks mainly to the depiction of how the ideals of the individual soldiers in a war did not always align with the side they ended up forced to fight for. This is a depressing movie that shows how war destroys the young men sent out to help those in power keep control.
1940s – She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949)
She Wore a Yellow Ribbon is a John Ford war movie starring John Wayne. The film sees Wayne as an aging veteran who wants to retire. However, his commanding officer orders him to stop the chance of a new Indian war in his territory.
This is a rare war movie because it’s not about military men fighting to win a war, or even to survive. This is a movie about seeking peace and trying to stop a new war from ravaging an area. This was also part of the Cavalry Trilogy by Ford, along with Fort Apache and Rio Grande.
This film was so popular and authentic that U.S. General Douglas MacArthur said he watched it once every month. Since there was no home video, this means he watched a film print of the movie monthly, something impressive for any movie of that era.
1950s – Paths Of Glory (1957)
Released in 1950, Stanley Kubrick directed one of the greatest anti-war movies ever made. In Paths of Glory, Kirk Douglas stars as Colonel Dax, the commanding officer of French soldiers who refuse a suicide attack. His commanding officer ordered him to represent the soldiers at a court-martial.
This is a terrifying tale because it remains unconcerned about the war after the opening scene (which Steven Spielberg copied in Saving Private Ryan). Instead, this is about military commanders who will kill their own loyal troops to keep everyone else in line. It is a severe condemnation of the horrors of war.
Based on the novel of the same name, it is about a real-life event called the Souain corporals’ affair, where a commanding officer makes a terrible decision and has his own men executed to cover up his mistake.
1960s – Dr. Strangelove (1964)
Seven years after he made his brilliant anti-war movie, Paths of Glory, Stanley Kubrick then directed a movie that made fun of the entire idea of war. In Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, the film tells the story of the possibility of war between the United States and the Soviet Union.
While fans mainly remember the film for Peter Sellers’ incredible performance in three different roles, the story here is also strong, as it shows how ridiculous the U.S. war room is. Men’s arrogance, mistakes, and misconceptions are all it takes to destroy the entire world.
From the ridiculous situations inside the war room to the ending scene of Slim Pickens riding the nuclear warhead to the ground to end the world, this is a movie that shows how dumb war really is.
1970s – Apocalypse Now (1979)
A few years after achieving tremendous success with his mafia movies in The Godfather franchise, Francis Ford Coppola made a war movie. What resulted was one of the most tumultuous filmmaking endeavors in Hollywood history, and a true masterpiece of cinema.
Martin Sheen stars as Captain Willard, a soldier on a secret mission. His job is to kill Marlon Brando’s Colonel Kurtz, a renegade Special Forces officer deemed insane. Along the way, the film shows the horrors of the Vietnam War.
Apocalypse Now came out just a few years after the United States pulled out of the Vietnam War. Showing the horrors that took place in that country, that close in time to the war itself, was shocking. However, the film’s brilliance holds up as well today as it did when Coppola directed it.
1980s – Platoon (1986)
Platoon is another movie that shows the devastating effects of the Vietnam War. However, this was different because writer-director Oliver Stone actually fought in the war, and this is a story from his first-hand experience.
The movie has an all-star cast, including Charlie Sheen, Willem Dafoe, Tom Berenger, and more. The movie follows a new volunteer (Sheen) who joins up with a platoon and deals with his commanding officers (Berenger, Dafoe), who can’t agree on their course of action.
What is terrifying is that this movie shows how the United States had no chance of winning this war on the ground, and as the soldiers die, it hits home that this was a no-win situation. Vietnam was the U.S.’s worst war, and Platoon showed it up close.
1990s – Saving Private Ryan (1998)
If anyone wants to see the real horror of war, watch Saving Private Ryan. This movie takes place during D-Day, and in the opening moments of the storming of Normandy, soldiers die in a non-stop barrage of bullets and mayhem. However, this is just the start of the carnage.
The story follows Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks), a man who leads his unit into battle to find one soldier, Private Ryan (Matt Damon), and return him home after his brothers died, and he is his family’s sole survivor. Along the way, almost every major soldier the movie introduces dies terribly.
Saving Private Ryan is not only the best war movie of the 1990s, but one of the best in the history of cinema. The movie won five Oscars, including Best Director, but its loss of Best Picture to Shakespeare in Love remains the biggest upset in Oscar history.
2000s – Letters From Iwo Jima (2006)
In 2006, Clint Eastwood directed two D-Day movies, one from each side of the battlefield. Flags of Our Fathers was about the Allied troops fighting to storm Normandy and raising the American flag to show victory. However, the superior movie was Letters from Iwo Jima, which was about Japanese soldiers fighting on the other side.
Ken Watanabe led the cast, and the entire story was there to show that neither side was completely evil for the men fighting in the trenches. Men ended up drafted and sent to fight for their country, and the only real villains were the politicians who created the war. Letters from Iwo Jima put faces to the men losing this great battle.
The movie showed there was good and evil on both sides of the battlefield, and its 91% Rotten Tomatoes score shows it hit on most of those notes. It also earned a Best Picture Oscar nomination and finished on several best-of lists for 2006.
2010s – Dunkirk (2017)
Christopher Nolan turned his talents to the war movie genre in 2017 with Dunkirk. The movie told the story of the Dunkirk evacuation in World War II. This was about battles and fighting, but the major story here was a rescue mission, helping this war movie stand out.
Nolan also wanted to show all the heroes, so he took the time to show the rescue from the perspective of the people on land, sea, and air, and how they all worked together to pull off this impressive and inspiring life-saving endeavor.
As with almost all Christopher Nolan movies, this was a massive success, making $533.7 million at the box office, while also earning awards recognition. Dunkirk earned eight Oscar nominations, winning three of them.
2020s – The Zone Of Interest (2023)
The Zone of Interest is a war movie that plays out as a drama, and it offers a very different look at wartime efforts on the big screen. Directed by Jonathan Glazer, this film focuses on a German Auschwitz commandant and his wife, who live in a home next to the Auschwitz concentration camp (the “Zone of Interest”).
Instead of focusing on the battlefields, this is a movie that follows the men, women, and children in the concentration camps. However, the story looks at them from the point of view of one of their captors and his family.