# War movie

Shooting of a scene of the movie A bridge too far. The movie shows how Allied troops fail at landing in the Netherlands, at Operation Market Garden, in 1944.
The bridge over the Ijssel in Deventer was used for the movie
Poster for the movie All Quiet on the Western Front, of 1930. This is an anti-war-movie.
A **war movie** is a genre of movie where a war or an armed conflict plays an important part in the movie. In most of the scenes, the actors will play in a scenario which is affected by war. War movies usually show modern wars, unlike other genres, which may show older conflicts. The first war movie was *Sea Fighting in Greece*, by Georges Meliès, of 1897. It is set in the Greco-Turkish War (1897). Documentaries about wars are not war movies.

War movies were often used to show how terrible war really is, and that peace is a better option. These are sometimes called anti-war movies.

War movies have the following characteristics:

* The mix fictional and non-fictional elements (for example, a fictional story about a real war). Even though everyone knows that this story did not happen, a very similar one could have happened. Very often, the viewer knows what the parties in the war were, and how the war ended.
* The place where the movie takes place, and the kinds of weapons used have a big influence on the movie.
* There are two options: either there is one protagonist, who needs to go through some development, and prove himself; or there is a group of people who need to find common traits and work together to be successful.

Usually, a part of the audience will idealize soldiers, and war. Very often, visual effects (stunts, explosions, etc) will be made to look very realistic. This can make it difficult to keep a critical distance.

## Examples

Successful war movies include:

* *The Birth of a Nation* (D.W. Griffith, 1915, American Civil War)
* *All Quiet on the Western Front* (Lewis Milestone, 1930, First World War)
* *For Whom the Bell Tolls* (Sam Wood, 1943, Spanish Civil War)
* *Paths to Glory* (Stanley Kubrick, 1957, First World War)
* *Die Brücke* (Bernhard Wicki, 1959, Second World War)
* *The Longest Day* (Ken Ananika /Andrew Marton/Bernhard Wicki/Erich Maria Remarque, 1962, Second World War) - last war movie shot in black and white
* *M\*A\*S\*H* (Robert Altman, 1970, Korean War)
* *The Deer Hunter* (Michael Cimino, 1978, Vietnam War)
* *Apocalypse Now* (Francis Ford Coppola, 1979, Vietnam War)
* *Das Boot* (Wolfgang Petersen, 1981, Second World War)
* *Platoon* (Oliver Stone, 1986, Vietnam War)
* *Full Metal Jacket* (Stanley Kubrick, 1987, Vietnam War)
* *Born on the Fourth of July* (Oliver Stone, 1989, Vietnam War)
* *Saving Private Ryan* (Steven Spielberg, 1998, Second World War)
* *No Man's Land* (Danis Tanović, 2001, Bosnian War)
* *Black Hawk Down* (Ridley Scott, 2001, Battle for Mogadishu in the Somali Civil War)
* *Brotherhood* (Kang Je-gyu, 2004, Korean War)
* *Flags of Our Fathers* and *Letters from Iwo Jima* (Clint Eastwood, 2006, Second World War)
* *American Sniper* (Clint Eastwood, 2014, Third Gulf War)
* *Dunkirk* (Christopher Nolan, 2017, Battle and Evacuation of Dunkirk, Second World War)
* *They Shall Not Grow Old* (Peter Jackson, 2018, First World War)
* *1917* (Sam Mendes, 2019, First World War)