The trip to hell
Apocalypse Now
FILM-TRIPTHE WAR PAGE
Are Throne of Blood and Gone With the Wind war films? How about Casablanca or To Be or Not To Be? Though war or the threat of war is present in these movies, I've chosen to cover them (and a number of other war movies) elsewhere on this site, e.g., To Be or Not To Be, Duck Soup and Dr. Strangelove... in comedy; Casablanca and Grand Illusion in drama; The Battleship Potemkin and The Birth of a Nation on the silents page. There is no hard and fast rule to determine what defines a genre. What I'm looking for are patterns of action usually present in war movies: impacts on combatants and/or civilians; the ambience of disaster or impending disaster; heroism or cowardice under fire, or under extreme political pressure. In these movies there is an enemy, often pictured as less than human, though this too can be undermined by an unexpected humanism (Grand Illusion and Das Boot), or an unexpected evil (Apocalypse Now). What seems obvious is that the war movie genre is most difficult to pin down. The listings on this page are not meant to be exhaustive, merely an effort to highlight some of the best war motion pictures. Though many of these films can be considered anti-war, it would be a simplification to say that bloodshed and carnage on screen put a film in the pro pacifism camp. Many of the best of these films are anti-war--and sometimes anti-military in their impact if not in their intent. Perhaps this is because it is so very difficult to glamorize the killing field or the devastated city. This is not to diminish heroism, but rather it seems that heroic acts, usually accomplished under extreme chaos, by their very nature belie compassion.
