Many war movies have incredible soundtracks with haunting music that contributes to the appeal of the films themselves.
One of the most outstanding is the soundtrack to Black Hawk Down by the renowned German composer Hans Zimmer. He´s the creator of many famous film soundtracks. He did the score for The Thin Red Line, Gladiator, The Last Samurai, King Arthur and The Pacific, to name but a few.
Now that would be something I would enjoy! Someone approaching me and asking for a recommendation, an introduction to the genre. Preferably someone who has a very bad opinion of war movies, possibly thinking all there is is Rambo trying to get to win this time and the like.
What a challenge that would be. I would tell him/her to watch… And now what? Just fantasizing about it leads me into nowhere land. Typical, when you want to get it right, you put yourself under pressure…
You would want to be a bit sneaky. Knowing the person´s taste in movies you would probably try to match your choice to that. But what if you don´t.
I would disadvise anybody in my shoes to suggest to watch one of the infantry combat movies like Hamburger Hill. I wouldn’t even suggest When Trumpets Fade even though I think it has a poetic quality. But that would be lost on the novice who most probably would only see the blood and pain.
On the other hand I would not advise to choose what I have named Wartime movies elsewhere. No Casablanca or The Man who cried (2000) (did I already mention how much I love this movie?).
A good start would be one of the air battle movies or a U-Boot movie since those are by far less bloody. Or one, like Merry Christmas /Joyeux Noel, that tells a true and very beautiful story.
OK, I think I got it.
This is what I would suggest you´d watch if you had never seen a war movie.
Dark Blue World (2001), Air Combat WWII
Merry Christmas (2005), Infantry, Trenches WWI
Das Boot (1981) U-Boot WWII
Glory (1989) Infantry Combat Civil War
Or what do you think?
War movies are a genre in which women will rarely if ever play major roles.
However there are a few that come to mind immediately.
Nurses
Mothers
Wives
Girl friends
Resistance fighters
Soldiers
Officers
Victims
The nurse is by far the most common role. In many movies they are very prominent. Especially in the sub genre of the war romance they get more than just small roles. (Yes, Pearl Harbor (2001) comes to mind, but…)
Some fine examples of nurses can be found in The Lighthorsemen (1987), In Love and War (1996), The English Patient (1996).
Mothers, wives, fiancées are often found at the very beginning of a movie, when the soldiers leave their homes like in Dark Blue World aka Tmavomodry svet (2001). We often see them again, reading a letter arriving from the field as in The Thin Red Line (1998). They serve as a sort of counterpoint to make the contrast between those who fight and those who stayed home even bigger. Then, you may find them once more at the very end, when the soldiers return home. One of the most poignant and touching wives is Madeleine Stowe in We Were Soldiers (2002). The story moves back and forth between the battle field and the home front depicting the agony the soldier´s wives went through when the telegrams arrived telling them one of their husbands had been killed.
Nurses become very often soldiers’ girl-friends which makes the two roles blend into each other. But many of the classic girl friends in movies depicting the second WW are the girls the men encounter in the countries they are shipped to. The American soldiers in The Pacific for example have Australian girl friends.
The role of the resistance fighter is quite a noble one. Not very frequent but appealing. Cate Blanchett as Charlotte Gray (2001) comes to mind. Or the women in Uprising (2001). And definitely Sophie Scholl (2005). The latest example of this kind is Carice van Houten as the jewish woman Rachel Stein who joins the Dutch resistance after having survived a massacre in the brilliant Black Book aka Zwartboek (2006).
Female soldiers that are even involved in combat are not very frequent. The most remarkable one I remember is the Vietnamese sniper in Full Metal Jacket (1987). A further female soldier is played by Demi Moore in G.I. Jane (1997) where she is said to be the first woman to have been granted access to the navy SEALS.
Women as officers is by far more common. Again Demi Moore played a role in the excellent legal drama A Few Good Men (1992). And then there is Meg Ryan as medevac chopper pilot Capt. Karen Walden in Courage under Fire (1996).
Unfortunately some of the above mentioned portraits of women in war movies are quite questionable and have been criticised repeatedly (especially G.I. Jane).
I almost forgot the victims. Inexcusable. There are as innumerable female victims in real wars as there are high numbers in movies. One of the saddest are the victims in Vietnam war movies. I think of Platoon (1986) and Casualties of War (1989). They are not the only ones. Of course not.
My favourite heroines are Cate Blanchett as Charlotte Gray, the wonderful Juliette Binoche as nurse in The English Patient and, another nurse, Sandra Bullock in In Love and War, and the outstanding Julia Jentsch as Sophie Scholl. The first two are based on novels, the other two on historical facts. Sandra Bullock plays the nurse Ernest Hemingway fell in love with when he fought in Italy during WWI.
S
ince I saw Stalingrad in which soldiers die in the snow or the episode Bastogne in Band of Brothers I consider the weather to be one of the key elements not only in the actual war but also in transmitting a sense of reality to the audience of war movies.
I have only seen five episodes of The Pacific so far. Episode 4 was the first to really grip me. It’s raining and raining endlessly. The morale of the soldiers gets lower and lower. There is no escaping this torrential downpour. Whoever has been in the tropics knows that this is not the kind of rain we Europeans or Americans are used to. There is the humidity, the violence and the noise. Yes, this kind of rain is as noisy as a constant shower open at full blast and as violent. If you are in a solid house maybe you could ignore it but in a hut or a tent…No way.
Incredible somehow that after all the heavy fighting the soldiers have been through at Guadalcanal it is the rain that finishes some of them off.
With all the natural disasters and extreme weather conditions that have always been taking their toll it is amazing we humans are not more humble. Or is this one of our well-kept secrets that fighting each other and subduing one another helps us fool ourselves into believing we are stronger than we are.
All About War Movies 