Best WAR Movie?

[Simon Darkshade]

At last! someone else has heard of "The Bridge"! Oh joy, oh rapture!
A few additions to worst war movies:

"Delta Force" with the Chuckmeister
some very bad 80s Cold War attempt with Rock Hudson as POTUS

The Dogs of War isn't that bad.

 

[Ohwell]

Originally posted by CurtSibling
The Eagle has Landed (I think that's the movie ohwell ws thinking of?)

Yeah, thats the one. It was pretty good, nice plot. I still can't remember the name of the one in the Pacific, something to do with midway and the Yamato. I wish I could keep the names straight.

 

[Anielewicz]

Anyone seen the Lost Battalion and Uprising?

Both interesting recent TV movies.

 

[kobayashi]

Originally posted by Alcibiaties of Athenae
Is that like bride of Frankenstein? :crazyeyes

Nope. In the combo sequel to Bridge OTRK and World of Suzie Wong, Willaim Holden decides to hold his wedding with Nancy Kwan on the spot where the bridge was destroyed.

 

[Suppersalmon]

Originally posted by CurtSibling
The Eagle has Landed

i saw that i liked it so much i went out to buy it

 

[Hamlet]

I was always partial to The bridge on the river Kwai, if that can be counted as a war movie.

 

[Thuloid]

Full Metal Jacket immediately comes to mind, as do fellow Kubric pics Spartacus and Paths of Glory (probably my favorite of the 3). For totally different reasons, how about Dr. Strangelove? Come to think of it, Stan had kind of a war movie obsession, huh?

Empire of the Sun is also good, but is it really a war movie? Come to think of it, is Apocalypse Now really a war movie? It's set in a war, but the war seems, in a way, incidental to the plot. Of the listed films, I like The Deer Hunter best. Marvellously depressing.

Better than Glory, of American Civil War pics, is Gettysburg. Andersonville also good, but really depressing.

 

[Gruntboy]

I'd say Gallipoli, Apocalypse Now, Cross of Iron, Full Metal Jacket, and Paths of Glory are anti-war movies... but there is no such thing as an anti-war movie.

Watch them if you want to feel glad that, no matter how cr*ppy your life is, you didn't have to go through that.

If you didn't like Thin Red Line, you missed the point.

Cross of Iron is without peer.

 

[Knowltok 2]

The Deerhunter is just disturbing. Great movie, but disturbing. The Russian Roulette scene will probably stay with me till I die.

IMO any movie shot in or around a real war is a war movie. Therefore, Bridge OTRK qualifies, as does Apocalypse Now.


How about The Dirty Dozen? As long as you aren't trying to take it seriously, a great movie.

 

[Richard III]

Is no one out there partial to "A Bridge Too Far?" That wins my vote easily.

Very pissed about The Thin Red Line. And to whoever said earlier that those who didn't like it missed the point, Malik (the director) was the one who missed the point. The book was brilliant, so full of tension that I realized I was actually ducking while reading about the assault on the hill. Trailers were great.

So I pumped the movie before its release in a local newspaper I had some shares in. BIG mistake:

Malik - still too doped up from Vietnam-era work - submitted something like 5 hours of film to the producers. They balked. So, Malik had a choice - leave in the story that Jones had written, or leave in an hours worth of his pretty cinematographic shots of multicoloured South Pacific parrots. He did the latter. Anyone who's read the book, watched the film and then looked at the liner photos for the (highly recommended) soundtrack can see where he made the chops - George Clooney was obviously left on the cutting room floor, and the odd appearance of planes flying over the landing craft was left in without the 10 minutes worth of action that would have been there in the book.

Worse, he made a few script changes that dramatically altered the point of the Colonel's character in the book, turning him from a necessary evil into a Vietnamesque caricature with all that "this is my war" stuff.

VERY disappointed. I stole someone else's remark for my own, calling it "40% a great movie, 60% a waste"

R.III

 

[CurtSibling]

Richard III just reminded me of a classic!

Richard III!

A cool war movie take on the Shakespeare epic,

Set in a dark 1940's Britain, very gripping stuff.

 

[Franklyn]

I'm partial to "Battle of the Bulge," with Henry Fonda. Gotta love the scene when he figures out the significance of floating oil drums and siphon hoses. Sure, it's schmaltz and sentimental in places, but I'll watch it whenever it's on.

Also, anyone interested in WWI should check out "The Lost Battalion," which aired recently on A&E cable. It's "Private Ryan" with doughboys. And yes, that's lil' Ricky "Silver Spoons" Schroeder playing the lead. (Poor guy -- no matter what he does as a grownup, he'll never live down his child acting days.)

 

[Richard III]

Originally posted by CurtSibling
Richard III just reminded me of a classic!
Richard III!
A cool war movie take on the Shakespeare epic,
Set in a dark 1940's Britain, very gripping stuff.

I own it on VHS, love it, modeled my office after Richard's, and my ID on this forum is not a coincidence. But be fair, however cool it might be, it isn't REALLY a war movie, more of a 1920s modernist art fetish flick. As one friend of mine put it, "great movie, but that battle at the end was a let-down. Five tanks? One airplane? If that movie had been made by Americans, there would have been dozens..."

So, war scenes, B+ at best. The price you pay for A+ art design and A+ to b+ acting.

R.III

 

[Richard III]

Originally posted by CurtSibling
Richard III just reminded me of a classic!
Richard III!
A cool war movie take on the Shakespeare epic,
Set in a dark 1940's Britain, very gripping stuff.

I own it on VHS, love it, modeled my office after Richard's, and my ID on this forum is not a coincidence. But be fair, however cool it might be, it isn't REALLY a war movie, more of a 1920s modernist art fetish flick. As one friend of mine put it, "great movie, but that battle at the end was a let-down. Five tanks? One airplane? If that movie had been made by Americans, there would have been dozens..."

So, war scenes, B+ at best. The price you pay for A+ art design and A+ to b+ acting.

R.III

 

[Gruntboy]

I said that. The book was indeed better than the movie (as is usually the case). Malik submitted something like 13 hours of film - but doesn't hollywood always cut for the worse?

Like all good movies, Malik left in the essence of the book (though the homoerotic scences are conspicuosly absent) whilst adding his own meaning. I think he encapsulated an important aspect of that phase of the war in the pacific. A bunch of men sail to a "tropical paradise", slog their guts out, die (in some fantastic sequences - the attack on the Japanese bivouac has to be the best 5 minutes of film I've ever seen) and then leave. What's it all about eh? Shame about George. But then anyone expecting this to be a vehicle for Mr Clooney had to be disappointed. Lots of great actors had small parts.

Regarding Richard III, surely the emphasis is on the acting, not the material? McKellan makes an amazing performance. Shakespeare didn't have massive battle sequences.

 

[Richard III]

Geez, Gruntboy, sorry to be in the thick of it on movie sequences, but to respond:

- Richard III - Yeah McKellen was fantastic, and I'm obviously a fan so don't get me wrong, but it's hard to say "the acting" was brilliant as opposed to just "the feel of the movie" because the Bening, Kirsten Scott Thomas and Pat what's his name were just plain weak and brought the whole level of acting down.
But like I said, Richard III was not a war movie. And that's fine by me - I was just attacking the idea that it WAS a war movie, which is not too fair a comparison alongside, say, Platoon.

- The Thin Red Line

I think it's fascinating how often the absence of the homoerotic thing in the movie is raised. To me the more controversial absence is the heteroeroticism, hinted at but not clear in the movie, of the guy who starts to enjoy combat because it gives him a sexual rush. In the film, all of that is reduced to him just thinking about his wife, which is not quite the same thing. Since the book is at its simplest an exploration of how sane men come to charge machineguns, this is a big absence.

As for Clooney, I couldn't care less about him, what I was referring to was the fact that his absence shows just how much STORY Malik shot but didn't keep in favour of lots of b.s. autuer shots. Like I said - 40% a great movie. Where Malik added his own message, though, it was in complete conflict with the somewhat profound message of the book: for example in the conflict between the colonel and the captain in the book, the colonel is, awkwardly, the moral winner.

The Thin Red Line wasn't awful; it was just a hideously wasted opportunity to take the good it had and do much better. Wasted opportunities are always more criminal a loss than abject, predetermined failures.

R.III

 

[deitydude]

FULL METAL JACKET

 

[Gruntboy]

Nice opinion Richard III.

I think we're agreed on McKellan but I'll always like TRL.

You son of York