The recent celebrations marking the 80th anniversary of Victory in Europe will have spurred many cinephiles like me to revisit some classic depictions of the Second World War. Saving Private Ryan, Ivan’s Childhood, The Dam Busters or Das Boot—besides the primitive thrill of battle, these movies (and many others no less accomplished) give us the satisfying sense of understanding some aspect of the conflict, of gaining insight into the participants’ experience. These films reveal how those who fought made sense of the war or failed to. While World War II has traditionally been counted among the few “good” wars, the pro-war propaganda films produced between 1939 and 1945 have largely been forgotten. By contrast, many if not most of the anti-war pictures the conflict inspired, such as Grave of the Fireflies, have established themselves as classics, powerful and angry commentaries not just on certain events of the Second World War, but on the folly and tragedy of war in general.
As the war passes out of living memory, the best of the films which addressed it become even more important, especially since they’re unlikely to be bettered. As the renowned and now octogenarian critic David Thomson observes in his 2023 study of war cinema, The Fatal Alliance: A Century of War on Film, the era of the war epic appears to have passed:
“[Director Clint Eastwood’s] Letters from Iwo Jima is a good film, so much so that we have to recognize how far big Hollywood pictures have declined since 2006. If you look at it again, there is the unnerving feeling that this kind of epic cannot work again”.
As a film portraying the Battle of Iwo Jima from the Japanese perspective, and almost entirely in Japanese, Letters was an ambitious undertaking for Eastwood. Though embraced by Japanese audiences, it was largely ignored by the director’s countrymen. That year the latter also spurned Eastwood’s Flags of Our Fathers, the much more costly would-be blockbuster to which Letters was the companion film. Flags gave us the famous battle from the American perspective. Thomson views the two movies as a single epic. If such ambitious cinematic undertakings are unlikely in the future, it’s largely because, as Martin Scorsese wrote in 2021:
“the art of cinema is being systematically devalued, sidelined, demeaned, and reduced to its lowest common denominator, 'content'".
No doubt films will continue to be made long into the future, but will they be worthy of being called cinema? Will future war “content” be war cinema? The great war films of the past are in any case hard to beat. What makes them so? For me it’s their sophistication, daring and power to move us. In this essay I’ll consider mostly films dealing with the conflicts relatively close to us in time, those of the 20th and 21st centuries. Partly due to that closeness, the very best of these films have a visionary intensity, coming as near to war's Rimbaudian derangement of the senses as cinema is able.
The great war films of the past are hard to beat. What makes them so? They have a visionary intensity, coming as near to war's Rimbaudian derangement of the senses as cinema is able.
I think of the bold explorations of madness in war undertaken by The Deer Hunter, Bridge On The River Kwai, Apocalypse Now and Come and See. Coppola’s Conradian epic, in particular, captures what J.G. Ballard called “the casual surrealism of war”. Apocalypse Now can make us fall to wondering how many other endeavours—ours or our society’s—might be mad.
I think, too, of the films that have closely examined the moral complexities and dilemmas of armed conflict confronted by the (hopefully) sane. Consider the way the struggle for authority between Platoon’s (1986) warring sergeants (Tom Berenger and Willem Dafoe) pits ruthless pragmatism against hopeful idealism. In The Big Red One (1980), Samuel Fuller drew on his WW2 service in the 1st Infantry Division to examine the dividing line between justified killing and murder. Ethical quandaries have been scrutinized from an equally fruitful angle by the various prison camp films, with Merry Christmas, Mr. Lawrence, Spielberg’s adaptation of Ballard's Empire of the Sun, and the aforementioned Bridge on the River Kwai the standout examples.
Saving Private Ryan (1998) is a much more celebrated entry in Spielberg’s oeuvre, and undoubtedly inaugurated war movies’ contemporary obsession with combat authenticity, thanks to the intense, 20-minute D-Day landing sequence the viewer is thrown into almost immediately. Arguably it was Saving Private Ryan’s deft coupling of innovative technical virtuosity with resonant humanist themes—the film invites us to consider what level of sacrifice we have a right to ask ordinary people to make in a war—which made it such a huge hit. Indeed, so successful was Spielberg’s opus that it reignited interest in the war, inspiring all manner of movies (few of which were as resonant, though they were often as impressive technically), books, games and TV series.
Then there are the films and series which show us morally and spiritually complex Axis servicemen and civilians, instead of cartoon villains or faceless enemies: Das Boot, the revisionist miniseries Unsere Mütter, Unsere Väter, Studio Ghibli’s Grave of the Fireflies, Eastwood’s Letters and Masaki Kobayashi’s anti-war trilogy titled The Human Condition.
War is perennial but art forms come and go. Cinema having long been unable to approach the level of past glories, Scorsese has not been alone in expressing pessimism over the state of the movies. In his 2020 memoir I’m Your Huckleberry, the late Top Gun star Val Kilmer writes that he made it “just under the wire”: he got to pursue a movie career just before “the death of film”.
The bitter pessimism of a sick actor in enforced retirement? Or real prescience? Certainly, the 2010s and 20s drive towards ever-simpler movies does not bode well. Our post-literate societies produce a lot of vacuous pictures, but at least they produce the occasional great film too—conceivably the day may come when everything is mere AI “slop”, unworthy of the name cinema. Another key factor is the growing importance of the Chinese, Indian and other non-Western markets. Filmmakers can no longer assume social, political and historical knowledge of the West on the part of their audience.
