21 WAR MOVIES YOU NEED TO SEE

Some of my favorites...what am I missing?

GLORY (Civil War; 1989)
Denzel Washington, Matthew Broderick and Morgan Freeman
Robert Gould Shaw leads the US Civil War’s first all-black volunteer company – fighting prejudices of both his own Union Army and the Confederates

GALLIPOLI (WW1; 1981)
Mel Gibson
Two Australian sprinters face the realities of war in a campaign in Turkey

ZULU (Anglo-Zulu War; 1964)
Stanley Baker, Jack Hawkins and Michael Caine
140 outnumbered British soldiers do battle with 4,000 Zulu warriors in South Africa

THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (WW2; 1957)
William Holden and Alec Guinness
After settling his difference with a Japanese POW camp commander, a british colonel co-operates to oversee his men’s destruction of a railway bridge for their captors – while oblivious to a plan by the allies it destroy it

EMPIRE OF THE SUN (WW2; 1987)
Christian Bale and John Malkovich
A young English boy struggles to survive under Japanese occupation during World War II

THE GREAT ESCAPE (WW2; 1963)
Steve McQueen, James Garner and Richard Attenborough
Allied POWs plan for several hundred of their number to escape from a German camp during WWII

SAVING PRIVATE RYAN (WW2; 1998)
Tom Hanks and Matt Damon
Following the Normandy landings , a group of US soldiers go behind enemy lines to retrieve a paratrooper whose brothers have been killed in action

PLATOON (Vietnam; 1986)
Charlie Sheen, William Dafoe and Tom Berringer
A young recruit in Vietnam faces a moral crisis when confronted with the horrors of war and the duality of man

FULL METAL JACKET (Vietnam; 1987)
Matthew Modine, R. Lee Ermey and Vincent D’Onofrio
A pragmatic US marine observes the dehumanizing effects the Vietnam War has on his fellow mariner recruits – from their brutal boot camp training to the bloody street fighting

LETTERS FROM IWO JIMA (WW2; 2006)
Ken Watanabe and Kazunari Ninomiya
The story of the battle of Iwo Jima between the United States and Imperial Japan during WWII – as told from the perspective of the Japanese who fought it (companion piece to Flags of our Fathers)

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS (WW2; 2009)
Brad Pitt, Eli Roth, Michael Fassbender and Cristoph Waltz
In Nazi-occupied France, a group of Jewish-American soldiers are chosen to spread fear throughout the Third Reich by scalping and brutally killing Nazis

THE HURT LOCKER (Iraq War; 2008)
Jeremy Renner and Anthony Mackie
Forced to play a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse in the chaos of war, an elite Army bomb squad unit must come together in a city where everyone is a potential enemy and every object could be a deadly bomb

BLACK HAWK DOWN (Battle of Mogadishu; 2001)
Josh Hartnett, Tom Sizemore and Ewan McGregor
123 elite US soldiers drop into Somalia to capture two top lieutenants of a renegade warlord and find themselves in a desperate battle with a large force of heavily-armed Somalis

THE PATRIOT (Revolutionary War; 2000)
Mel Gibson and Heath Ledger
Peaceful farmer, Benjamin martin, is driven to lead the Colonial Militia during the American Revolution when a sadistic British officer murders his son

THE DIRTY DOZEN (World War II; 1967)
Lee Marvin, Ernest Borgnine and Charles Bronson
A US Army Major is assigned a dozen convicted murderers to train and lead them into a mass assassination mission of German officers in World War II

WE WERE SOLDIERS (Vietnam War; 2002)
Mel Gibson, Sam Elliott and Madeline Stowe
The story of the first major battle of the American phase of the Vietnam War and the soldiers, on both sides, who fought it

APOCALYPSE NOW (Vietnam War; 1979)
Martin Sheen, Robert Duvall and Marlon Brando
During the on-going Vietnam War, Captain Willard is sent on a dangerous mission into Cambodia to assassinate a renegade Green Beret who has set himself up as a god among a local tribe

THE THIN RED LINE (World War II; 1998)
Jim Caviezel, Sean Penn and Nick Nolte
Director Terrence Malick’s adaptation of James Jones’ autobiographical 1962 novel, focusing on the conflict at Guadalcanal during the second World War

LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (World War I; 1962)
Peter O’Toole, Alec Guinness and Anthony Quinn
Epic rumination on a flamboyant and controversial British military figure and his conflicted loyalties during wartime service

THREE KINGS (Persian Gulf War; 1999)
George Clooney, Mark Wahlberg and Ice Cube
In the aftermath of the Persian Gulf War, four soldiers set out to steal gold that was stolen from Kuwait – but they discover people who desperately need their help

PATTON (World War II; 1970)
George C. Scott and Karl Malden
The World War II phase of the controversial American general’s career is depicted