Top War Films

Top war films in my order are below, im sure you will have a different view of the best war films ever made.
There has not been a war film post like this for over three years, unless my date is wrond on my computer, it said the last one was 2003, so it needed to be done. The best war films of all time are:

Saving Private Ryan
Band of Brothers – not a feature movie, but a lengthy movie style account.
The Great Escape
A Bridge Too Far
Black Hawk Down
Gladiator
Apocalypse Now
Schindler's List
Battle of Britain
Spartacus
Brave Heart
Pearl harbor
The Longest day
Troy
300
Lawrence of Arabia
The Last samurai
Kingdom of heaven
The Bridge on the river Kwai
Gone with the Wind
The Thin Red Line
We were soldiers



Not there are these two films, I haven’t included them in the war list, but they deserve a mention as they are based around conflict, and war enough for me to mention them as a side order – legends of the fall and The last of the Mohicans. Oh and i almost forgot - Escape To Victory - Slvester Stallone and Pele, it is based on war time europe so i had to mention it.

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james adams

Escape to Victory is a Classic film and one of my favorites, but is it a War film or a sports film?

I'm going to leave this thread up, but I'd point out that while it may have been years since a similar thread was started, it's only been 2 months since it was last replied to, and that's the important part.

I assume you’re referring to the 1981 John Huston film Victory in which Sylvester Stallone, Michael Caine, and a bunch of real soccer players play Allied prisoners of war who use a soccer game against an elite German crew as a method to escape. Yeah, it was a “war film” to the same degree that The Longest Yard is a cops-and-robbers movie!

Seeing Stallone among real athletes reminded me of a British TV game show I saw years ago on my first visit to the UK. The idea of the show was to take some athlete from another sport—polo, cricket, rugby, swimming, gymnastics—and set him or her up as goalie in front of a soccer goal. Then they call up a viewer at home to participate in the game. This consists of having a TV camera a few feet in front of the goalie that is panning up and down, back and forth all over the goal area. Then when the camera pans to a target area that the viewer likes, he yells, “Shoot!” over a speaker phone and an airgun or something fires a soccer ball out from under the camera to the selected target area. The goalie, of course, is supposed to block the ball, and if the homeviewer scores, he gets a prize. (Maybe it was 2 out 3 or 3 out of 5, or 1 shot per customer; I forget).

Anyway, the one time I saw this loony game, the athlete du jour was a boxer. And every time that soccer ball came at his head, he’d duck the “punch,” so viewers were scoring like crazy while the MC was screaming, “Block it! Block it!” But taking a shot to the head was just not in the boxer’s nature, and they never laid a “glove” on him during the whole show!

I kept thinking of that boxer as I watched Stallone pretend to be tending goal against a top German soccer team.

Every time the subject of war movies comes up in this forum, I mention what I consider to be the most realistic war movie ever--not in terms of guns and gore but in the nature of humans as soldiers, what they do and say and feel and the way they do and say it. Anyway, my pick as the best--most realistic--war movie is The Red Badge of Courage. But everytime I throw it out, no one ever responds to it And I'm sure that at least some of you are familar with the book and movie! Another realistic war movie, I think, is A Walk in the Sun. But nobody ever wants to talk about it either.

It's been too long since I've seen The Red Badge of Courage to comment on it. But I have trouble with a list that includes Pearl Harbor but not All Quiet on the Western Front. That's a problem with all-inclusive lists: there's usually gonna be something you forget.

And is Lawrence of Arabia considered a war movie?

Three Kings is in my top list.

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Suspect's Reviews

Zulu. A fantastic war movie.

It's about a British soldier and the many battles he fights during WWI - so yes.

As for my favourite war movie - hard to tell, don't really watch a lot. I'll just go with Apocalypse Now. On that note, would you really consider it a war movie?

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Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

I love Apocalypse Now (in my top 20), but as for if it's a war movie, I'd say yes and no. It's set in the Vietnam war, and there are plenty of images of war in it, but the main thrust of the story is not about war.

Zulu is my favorite movie.
Some people have issues with its political message with regards to British colonialism in Africa.
In spite of all that, it is a fantastic war movie.

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Harold Ross

I have not seen The Red Badge of Courage, but I have read the book and it is really good. I don't know why I haven't got around to watching it, because I have heard nothing but good things about it. I have some free time this weekend, so I may have to change that.

How Can you leave out Full Metal Jacket and Deer Hunter and what about Platoon, Hamburger Hill, Iron Triangle, The Siege Of Firebase Gloria, 84 Charlie Mopic, From Here To Eternity, Korean movies: Shiri and Taguki.

There has been lots of war movies and some people here mention all of them which seems more like they're trying to show off how many films they watched and that doesn't make sense because we are talking about BEST war films not name-all-war-films-you've-seen-in-your-lifetime.

So, in my opinion The Thin Red Line wins hands down.

Apocalypse now is another great war movie.

I also think Three Kings is one of best war movies, if it counts as a war movie, because from what I remember it actually happens after not during the war, so I am not sure about this one.

I've long suspected that most of the participants in this forum are much too young to have even seen, much less develop a taste for black-and-white films; therefore they're totally unfamilar with All Quite on the Western Front, Paths of Glory, A Walk in the Sun, or even Sands of Iwo Jima, to name but a few of the classics. That's also why their movie lists cover scarcely a decade.

Hmm, it had artillery fire, strafing, bombing, machine guns, heroic charges, stubborn defenses, uniformed armies on both sides and guerillas in the middle. Sounds pretty military to me, especially since the movie concentrates on Lawrence's military performance in rallying the Arabs and hardly touches the philosophy or insights of his Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

On a press junket to South Africa years ago, I was at one point just a few miles from Roarke's Drift where that battle was fought, but didn't have the opportunity to go visit. However, I did get an interview with the king of the Zulus who played his own grandfather in the early scenes of the missionary and his daughter visiting the Zulu village.

I once worked with a writer who had written one of the definitive histories of the Zulu War, The Washing of the Spears, and who had visited many of the actual battle sites, including the site of the massacre that preceded the battle of Roarke's Drift. One of many reasons for that earlier disaster was that the ammuntion wagons were stationed well back of the fighting lines and soldiers had to be sent back to get more ammo for their companies on the line. Turns out that the officer in charge of the ammo was a bureaucrat of the worst sort insisting that the ammo could be turned over only to persons of certain rank or higher with the proper paper work. To top it off, the ammo was in wooden boxes about the size of a loaf of bread that was fastened round by steel bands that needed a special tool for removing the inset screws to open the box. Only a few of those tools were available and the people in charge of the ammo had all of them. So desperate for ammo with the Zulus pouring in from all around, the soldiers were grabbing the ammo boxes and using their bayonets to hack through the metal bands. My friend had pieces of those metal bands, which he said were still scattered around the battle field, showing dents and cuts where the soldiers struggled to get more ammo. Gives you a strange feeling to hold a bit of history like that in your hand.

There was another film later made of the massacre that preceded the defensive stand at Roarke's Drift--Zulu Dawn, starring Burt Lancaster. Watching those two films back to back gives you a good insight into that battle, despite some creative changes of history.

I've only seen bits and pieces of Three Kings on TV, but based on what I've seen and what I read about it when it first came out, I've always wondered if it wasn't just a retooling of the basic plot of the ol' John Wayne classic Western, The Three Godfathers. Anyone out there noticed a resemblence between the two?

Sure, Three Kings pays homage to The Three Godfathers, as well as its predecessor, Three Bad Men, so it's a mixture of semi-topical and semi-sentimental.

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Now, see, to me that's an interesting connection. Wonder why nothing ever was said about that? Seems to me some of the profession critics could have used that to put the film into perspective and demonstrate how movie plots evolve and change over time. Now, they just throw out movies as though they existed in a vacumn with no analysis of how one King Kong differs from another.

I assume, Mark, that you've seen all three films--how would you compare them?

Yes, i've seen all the movies, but I actually misspoke earlier. 3 Bad Men isn't the film I wanted to reference; it was Hell's Heroes (1930), directed by William Wyler.

To really discuss them, I'd need to rewatch them all, but I can say that Hell's Heroes, although it's a primitive early talkie, is really stark and very unsentimental. It's also pre-Hays Code, so I seem to recall some unexpected touches, such as swearing and strong violence. As each of the other two versions of Three Godfathers came along (1936 and 1948), they seemed to lighten up on the starkness and increase the sentimentality. I honestly don't recall any strengths of the '36 version, except for perhaps the basic plot. The Ford version is beautifully photographed in color, but it's quite obvious how much it's toned down from raw reality of te 1930 film.

Three Kings seems to be going in one direction, and it does go that way for about two-thirds of the movie. The other films all have a quick, violent scene, followed by the finding of a baby, which propels the plot from then on. In Three Kings, the plot is about staying alive and then finding the loot and getting it out. There are innocent families who come across the characters' paths, but it's only near the end, after they've succeeded at being "bad men", that their conscience kicks in. It's the same with the earlier films, except it takes a lot longer to get to this point. Of course, it allso turns the film more towards sentimentality. The fact that the similar plot elements happen so late in the film may be the reason why Three Kings isn't mentioned as a follow-up to Three Godfathers. On the other hand, maybe the reviewers just didn't know because the studio didn't bring it up.

Sorry that this is so superficial, but it's a start. I'll try to watch the films again because I have them all on VHS. I'm just not sure when I'll get to it.