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In honor of this Memorial Day I'm taking a look at a few of my favorite war movies -- though to be perfectly frank with you at the outset, I've really never been a big fan of the War & Military genre of film, generally speaking. I mean, don't get me wrong, I love nothing more than watching stuff blow up... provided it's a Romulan spacecraft or a Transformer or some other creature similarly othered into something inhuman. I like to keep my enjoyment of stuff blowing up far, far away from this tender and easily triggered little thing I have permanently installed in my skullcase called human empathy, which I find nearly impossible to turn off. And let's face it: however grand the pyrotechnics, recognizing one's own humanity in something blowing up is, well, kind of a killjoy. How can I ENJOY the explosions and blossoming fireballs if I have to FEEL things? BAH! Stupid feelings!
I should also add that I am also, as you shall see momentarily, clearly a child of the Vietnam era, born five years before the U.S. officially ended operations with the Fall of Saigon in 1975. Thus, my taste runs toward the hard and bloody realism common to war films since -- movies that recognize, and document, the incalculable human costs of modern warfare and why it must always be something only resorted to at the last, after all other possible diplomatic options have been exhausted.
War may indeed be hell, but the following five films make of the grisly and terrifying experience of war something sublime, capturing as they do great and terrible human truths played out in the extremity of a military theater. [WARNING: The videos below contain a fair amount of violence and bloodshed. Proceed with caution.]
Apocalypse Now (1979) Though parts of this film in retrospect appear bloated as Brando's Kurtz, thirty years later Apocalypse Now still channels, in a way that seems timeless, the cold mechanics of war and how its unrelenting brutality has the capacity to degrade those who operate within it both morally and psychologically. The epic helicopter attack scene below outlines the growing disconnect between these men and the atrocities they're enacting as they, from a sterile distance, bombard a village of Vietnamese men, women, and children to the sweeping soundtrack of Ride Of The Valkyries, a contrivance intended to lend a heroic flourish to their barbarism. The cinematography here is stunning -- its odd to not be able to help but find beauty in a scene so packed with horror (that tension being precisely the point, I imagine).
Platoon (1986) Noted egotist Oliver Stone somehow managed to keep himself in check just long enough to produce a film that feels like a 120 minute meditation on the 'heart of darkness' Coppola really only scraped the surface of in the late 70s. In Platoon, Stone digs into the guts -- literally and figuratively -- of modern soldiering, conjuring a visceral, ground-level vision of the internal and interpersonal conflicts and soul-rending moral ambiguities of Vietnam's guerilla warfare. In the film combat becomes suffocatingly immediate, and its chronicle of both mental and physical human anguish is steeped in ever-escalating emotional intensity. In the scene below -- perhaps the film's most iconic -- music is used to an end different from its deployment in Apocalypse Now, brought to the fore not to gloss savagery but to throw it into the starkest possible relief (get out your hankies, folks).
Full Metal Jacket (1987) Spare and beautiful in its ugliness, Stanley Kubrick's vision here owes much to Stone's Platoon, which he is said to have greatly admired. Raw, but emotionally minimalist compared to its predecessor, Full Metal Jacket to my mind resonates most when it lingers, as it does in the scene below, on the tangible nightmarescape of war's reality. Here the tension between the scene's imagery of physical devastation (summoning a distinct Hell-On-Earth vibe), the soldiers' song, and its accompanying narration obliquely map the numbing, dehumanizing impact that existing in such a world has on the human psyche. It is, simply put, classic Kubrick, his great and terrible genius manifest.
Richard III (1995) Yes, yes, it's Shakespeare. But Shakespeare brought into the modern era of 1930s Fascist England, with the almost impossibly brilliant Sir
