War movies are often used as hard-hitting ways to make us more aware of how grim war really is. Still, many Hollywood dramas completely ignore the real dangers that wars pose to both the people fighting and the civilians caught in the crossfire.
They live up to the famous Mark Twain quote, “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story,” which may not even be Twain’s but is too good to pass up. These are the movies where men who are blown up by atomic bombs or hit by 20 bullets somehow survive, or where disobedient soldiers keep ignoring the need for discipline.
There have been a lot of war movies that aren’t realistic, but there have also been some that are very realistic and have a lot to say about war. Let’s look at the war movies that are the most real…
All Quiet on the Western Front
All Quiet on the Western Front has been remade many times, but Edward Berger’s 2022 version, based on Erich Maria Remarque’s novel of the same name, was the first time it stayed true to its roots. The original film from 1930 has a slight edge in the critical reception debate, and it may be the most important film of the 1930s. Written by a German about German soldiers in World War I, the realism of the action scenes and the times when German was spoken added another layer of realism to a very moving movie.
All Quiet on the Western Front is a movie that is proud of showing the true, godless reality of war. It is a clear, high-definition picture of war at its worst. It shows that there is no honor, bravery, or morality in taking part in the mass killing of innocent men, which is something the West’s propaganda machines keep saying over and over again. The choice of a fresh-faced schoolboy as the main character, who doesn’t know about the dangers and evils he’s about to see, is both poetic and brutally accurate. Hundreds of thousands of young men, many of whom were still in school, actually signed away their lives when they joined the military. It can’t get any sadder or more real than that.
Come and See
Come and See is like All Quiet on the Western Front in that it is a scary anti-war movie from Russia. This may be a bit ironic, given what is going on in Ukraine at the moment. But people think that this 1985 movie is one of the most disturbingly accurate depictions of what happened on the Eastern Front when the Nazis came to town. As a young boy runs away from his small village to join a Russian resistance group, he soon has to face how the Nazis have hurt him, his family, and the rest of Russia.
Jarhead
The movie Jarhead by Sam Mendes might not be the first thing you think of when you think of movies that get to the heart of war, especially when it comes to the cruel art of combat. But the 2005 movie set during the Gulf War and based on Anthony Swofford’s interesting memoir is a portrait of the mind-numbing boredom that people in Iraq had to deal with. It’s like an American version of Das Boot, which was perfect at showing how boring life can be.
Soldiers got more and more angry as days, weeks, and months went by with nothing happening. Swofford’s (Jake Gyllenhaal) narration says, “Four days, four hours, one minute. That war was mine, but I never fired my gun. This is a movie that doesn’t show the hopelessness of constant fighting. Instead, it shows the hopelessness of people who have trained for years to just sit around in the Saharan sun, read books, and pass the time in any way they can, all while the threat of battle looms over them. It’s a movie that shows how being bored and having a constant mental battle with yourself can be just as hard as being hurt and seeing people die in war.
Saving Private Ryan
Whether you see it just once or every other Sunday on network TV, the image of a soldier without legs crying out for his mother while holding his stomach will be just as scary each time. Saving Private Ryan, Steven Spielberg’s war movie that won an Academy Award, is a no-holds-barred look at the horror and grotesque reality of war.
From the unforgettable opening scene, in which thousands of American and allied soldiers storm the beaches of Normandy and are met by a hail of Nazi gunfire, to the exact recreation of bombed-out, abandoned towns in northern France, Saving Private Ryan shows not only how hard it was for the soldiers, but also for the civilians who got caught in the middle.
Stalingrad
Historians often say that the Battle of Stalingrad was one of the bloodiest parts of the Second World War because more than two million people were hurt and more than a million people died. The famous battle between the Germans and the Soviet Union is shown in the 1992 movie Stalingrad, which was directed by Joseph Vilsmaier. The movie tells the story from the point of view of the Axis and focuses on how the German Army was completely unprepared for the extreme weather conditions.
Thousands of people died in the freezing, sub-zero Russian winter because they didn’t have enough food, ammunition, warm clothes, or other supplies. Stalingrad is about a group of soldiers who, after a warm break in the relative peace of Italy, are sent to Stalingrad, where they have to fight not only the Russians but also the deadly cold.
