20. “Platoon” (1986)
It’s relatively rare for a filmmaker to have served real combat time in the military, and it’s that direct experience that makes Oliver Stone’s “Platoon” such a potent movie. Stone was a decorated soldier in Vietnam at the age of 21, and channeled that time into this semi-autobiographical drama, the first Vietnam film to be made by a real vet, which follows Stone surrogate Chris Taylor (Charlie Sheen) as he’s torn between two mentors, the borderline psychopathic Barnes (Tom Berenger) and the idealistic Elias (Willem Dafoe). There might be something a little too simplistic in the devil-and-angel-on-the-shoulder narrative (Berenger’s a little too evil, Dafoe a little too angelic), but there’s an authenticity to the dynamic between soldiers that’s rare to find, and it’s truly nightmarish in its depiction of combat in sequences that Stone has never quite matched.
19. “Master And Commander: The Far Side Of The World” (2002)
Perhaps somewhat scuttled by expectations of being “‘Gladiator‘ on the high seas,” Peter Weir‘s terminally underrated Napoleonic Wars-era epic is an absolute blast of old-fashioned derring-do and spectacle. Russell Crowe is at his most dashingly Errol Flynn-like as the captain of the HMS Surprise, summoning great chemistry with Paul Bettany‘s ship doctor just a year after they’d teamed on the more successfully Oscar baity, yet infinitely duller “A Beautiful Mind,” but it’s the battle scenes that earn it a place here. Despite contending with the famously steep challenge of shooting on water, complicated further by the period setting aboard a 19th-century man-of-war (pursuing, and eventually defeating, an equally cumbersome French vessel, the Acheron) the action is fluid and exciting and grandiose, meaning that even though it sadly never became the franchise-starter it was designed as, it remains one of the best evocations of Napoleonic naval warfare ever.
18. “The Hurt Locker” (2008)
Still the best evocation of the nature of American warfare post-Vietnam, containing the best performance Jeremy Renner has ever given, Kathryn Bigelow‘s Best Picture winner is coming up on ten years old but hasn’t aged a day. In fact, despite combat evolving in the interim — being so much more about drones these days — the taut, suspenseful drama still feels thrillingly immediate, and is oddly flattered, on a rewatch, by being seen on the small screen. There, the film’s clever trick of intimacy amid explosions and grunt’s-eye detail amid wider set pieces really connects, as an elite bomb disposal team (Renner, Anthony Mackie and Brian Geraghty) count down the days until they’re rotated home. Capturing both the tension and torpor of the Iraq War, yet refusing to glamorize combat even a little, like its main character, it remains resolutely boots-on-the-ground, showing what happens when you send a weird man into a weird war in a new, weird world.
17. The Big Red One (1980)
There’s a gruff, “c’mere son, grab a whisky, lemme tell you” quality to Sam Fuller‘s 1980 picture, which was indeed formed around his own anecdotes. It makes for a slightly shaggy, episodic film — in interesting contrast to his also-excellent 1951 Korean War film “The Steel Helmet.” Punchy though ‘Helmet’ is, with time, the picaresque narrative of “The Big Red One” feels like the broader statement on war, with the ensemble cast (including Mark Hamill, Robert Carradine and a superb Lee Marvin) stumbling through incidents big and small over a three-year period. Set pieces like the D-Day landing at Omaha Beach, a battlefield birth, an assault on an insane asylum held as a German outpost and the liberation of Falkenau concentration camp provide some unforgettable storytelling, but even quieter moments pack a wallop, like the squad coming across a WWI memorial and thinking it’s for their own dead because “The names are the same.” To which Marvin’s sergeant replies “They always are.”
16. “Cross Of Iron” (1977)
Perhaps Sam Peckinpah’s pre-eminent neglected masterpiece, set within a company of German soldiers in Soviet Russia, “Cross of Iron” is less about the specifics of WWII or Nazi atrocity than it is about internal division in the armed forces, class conflict and oppositional ideologies — a sort of frontline “La Grande Illusion.” James Coburn gives a career-high performance as the rough-hewn Sergeant who loathes the officer class here represented by James Mason‘s Colonel and David Warner‘s decent but debilitatingly cynical Captain. The tensions come to a boil when ruthlessly ambitious aristocrat Captain Stransky (Maximilian Schell) arrives with the sole aim of winning an Iron Cross as the ultimate status and glory-obsessed soldier. The thrillingly lucid filmmaking extends from dream sequences to long battle scenes, and Peckinpah directs like he’s wielding a scalpel and surgically eviscerating the myth of war and the masculine id.
