The Aesthetics of War Movies

which ones do you like? which don't you like? why? what do you like & dislike about them? what makes a war movie "good"? war movies or movies that are about War (i.e., Apocalypse Now etc.)? exploitation or art or (more likely) both? Is it even possible to make a war movie that isn't exploitative, both of the combatants & of the non-combatants stuck in the middle? in fact, is it possible to make a war movie of social worth, whatever that is?

I realize a lot of those are questions w/no real answers.

prompted largely by my recent viewing of The Hurt Locker. a few of my thoughts on which here if you care to read them.

a few from my list (not including the really obv stuff):

Go Tell the Spartans
Thin Red Line
The Battle of Algiers
Jarhead
both Gettysburg & Glory
Das Boot
both The Great Escape & The Dirty Dozen
Beaufort

on the list but haven't seen yet - Generation Kill, Rescue Dawn, Zulu Dawn, Gallipoli, Waltz w/Bashir, The Killing Fields, Breaker Morant, Cross of Iron

not on my list - every John Wayne war movie esp. Green Berets, tons of garbage post-Platoon 80s cashin Vietnam flicks, post-Saving Private Ryan cashins (i.e. Pearl Harbor), all the Rambos, all Chuck Norris vehicles, Navy SEALs, etc etc

thoughts? recommendations (guess this one depends on what you define as a "war movie")?

& since this is art literature & film I suppose war novels as well.

to get us started - The Sorrow of War by Bao Ninh. could not recommend it more highly.

crackerjack said:

Patton should be on your list - character study of someone who was himself obsessed with military history and his own self-mythologising (there's one great scene when he insists he can sense the ruins of Carthage)

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oh it most definitely is (the list was actually much longer but I chopped it down so as not to scare off recommendations. a great, great film, probably the best biopic ever made about a military figure. funnily enough I went to high school w/one of George C. Scott's grandsons. a total jerk - arrogant rich kid, obnoxious frat boy in training type. none of his grandad's talent to make it forgivable either, we were in a school play together & he sucked.

also Come & See is definitely on the to-see list, right at the top. I was just reading about it the other day actually.

IdleRich said:

But, in general, I've never really thought about it before but now you ask the question I realise that I don't generally like war films. I think that I tend to avoid them without realising that I'm doing it - I did quite like the Battle of Algiers but probably not as much as I should - and it's not a full on war film is it really?

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The Battle of Algiers is most certainly a war film, & one that is infinitely more relevant to most wars that are fought these days than any sweeping, grandiose WWII epic. it's a film, perhaps the defining film, about insurgency/counterinsurgency - terms related to & overlapping with "small war", "brush war", "low intensity conflicts, etc Certainly it's a film one wishes Rumsfeld & Tommy Franks would have watched in 2003.

Thin Red Line - that may just be a Terrence Malick thing yeah? I mean everyone agrees about Badlands but other than that it seems people are pretty split on his films (I liked The New World too). I read also read James Jones' novel before I saw the movie. there's another war novel worth reading actually, as deadpan cynical as they come & all the better for it. Like The Naked & The Dead if it didn't suck.

Full Metal Jacket is on the list of the obvious I should think. I dunno, actually the book there's better as well. The dude who wrote it actually went to write a much, much crazier sequel, that no one read, wherein Private Joker is captured by, comes to empathize with & eventually joins the Viet Cong. it is one of the most ferociously bitter things I've ever read, his level of disgust with the war & the United States in general is overwhelming. both books are available to read for free here.

craner said:

War movies depicting disasters of the Clinton era is quite an interesting topic. Black Hawk Down has some merit, I think, also massive flaws; Behind Enemy Lines is one of the most ludicrous films I've ever seen. The epic miscasting of Owen Wilson sort of comes out the other side, turns magical.

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I hated Black Hawk Down tbh. as gung-ho great as it made the individual American soldiers look, it seemed the whole thing was a long, extended video game of Rangers shooting at frothing mad, Muslim Black Others. all that Starship Troopers nonsense about The Skinnies. tho I guess it did a good job of capturing what a clusterf**k the whole Somalia mission was all the way down the line (also clearly anything named Operation Gothic Serpent is doomed to failure).