Yeah Generation Kill is darkly funny at times ...

You might want to throw in The Silent Enemy too. Co-Stars a youngish Sidney "Carry On..." James in a semi-serious role :P

grave of the fireflies

Favoriting this thread.

Some great recommendations.

While quite unknown, Capitaine Conan is often considered the best WWI movie of the last 30 years.

It can be quite confusing, because it does not deal with the combat in the trenches in France, but with the combat on the Balkanic Front (Franco-Serbian versus Bulgarians), the political situation in Romania in 1918-1919 and then the French intervention in Ukraine during the Russian Civil War. As a Pole, though, this is probably the sort of thing you are interested in - but if you are not from Eastern Europe I suppose it can get confusing "what are the French doing in Crimea anyway ?"

It deals with the brutalisation of the soldiers and the strict discipline armies try to impose them (sometimes to the absurd) to curb war crimes, looting and that sort of events. Not at all the "Patriotic / Pathos movie". The middle of the movie in Romania is about the "spirit" of the soldiers after the war but not at home and under growing bolchevik influence. Very interesting IMO.

I believe it is I believe very realistic in its depiction of the Balkanic front - almost no motor vehicules, but horses and mules everywhere, tireless marches, French soldiers trained with slings to launch grenades, hand to hand combat with knifes and bayonettes, ...

For some reason, there is a complete version on youtube, but in Spanish :

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9vV6va-vnM

The first battle scene (against the Bulgarians) starts at about at 15:30, first from afar, then, well, close and bloody. It is actually the only "WWI battle in mountain" I know of. If you like it, you can get the movie in a language you understand.

Yeah, I think I might watch Generation Kill. What I don't like in "patriotic" war movies (you can see only that kind of Polish war movies)) is that they show one side of the conflict like freaking angels. We don't rape, we don't kill innocents, we don't do stupid things, we are noble. And THEM are the bastards, hell bound to destroy our beloved country.

I don't like that kind of generalisation and simplification. This is why I lately started to seek some German war movies, to see a different approach.

And I really recommend The Bridge (1959, original title: Die Brucke). IT shows that "nazis" were people too, they didn't want to be there just like other sides of the conflict didn't.

I don't like presenting the enemy in the movie like a mindless horde that will try to kill you with their teeth if they ran out of bullets.

And about Pacific once again. It's like band of brothers but WITHOUT any kind of brotherhood of arms there. So it was simply painful to watch.

So again I can't comment on the Pacific, but there is a difference between showing the opposing side as "the bad guy" versus "the enemy in the distance". Those are two different things and "the enemy in the distance" is the same regardless of whose perspective your viewing it from. In Band of Brothers, german soldiers are neither shown as good nor bad. They are, with a few exceptions where their humanity is shown, simply enemy soldiers and to put it mildly, some American and Allied soldiers (including protagonists) are shown to do bad things in the program. Similarly in Das Boot, Allied seamen and air force hunting the U-boat are never shown as good or bad. They are simply in enemy boats and planes to be sunk or run away from. In fact the only time the humanity of Allied sailors is (briefly) shown in Das Boot is in the scene after they've sunk a cargo ship and it is a very affecting scene where even the U-boat crew are horrified.

It's true that typically we see things from Allied perspective and that many war movies - especially the old ones, but not always - do use the trope that the enemy are scum and show them behave uniformly horribly. But that doesn't mean that seeing the war from the German or the Japanese angle is intrinsically any different from showing the war from the Allied angle when the enemy is at a distance. That the typical viewpoint is that the Germans are the enemy and the Allies are us, doesn't actually render a film where the Germans are the protagonists and the Allies are the enemy any/more less humanizing than the reverse (except that in the larger context beyond the film that we don't see it as often). Such films are likewise showing the war from a particular soldier's or group's vantage point.

The good war movies don't use the trope that the enemy are all scum and the best do try to show their humanity relative to the protagonists (some are good, some are bad) - but if the structure of the program or movie is such that the story is being told from the vantage point of particular group of soldiers rather than all sides in the war, the latter can be very hard to achieve consistently. Band of Brothers does do it in some parts of the program, but it is limited by the human, non-combat interactions Easy company can reasonably be expected to have had (or did have for those historical encounters) with their german counterparts during a war since it is told completely from Easy company's perspective - i.e those interactions pretty much occurring only once the war is over. Now one can argue that after watching Band of Brothers, one should watch Das Boot or another movie/series from the German perspective to round out ones views about the humanity of the soldiers on each side (and I would agree with that), but that's a far cry from a particular movie being jingoistic or otherwise smothered in patriotism because it is told from a particular vantage point with protagonists from only one side.

I agree with what you've said. But mostly it's not THAT hard to show the other side were humans too - usually everything it takes is to show some close combat, or attack on a bunker, or anything that would show "kill the Allies" is not the goal of their lives, they wrote letters to their families too, etc etc.

I agree and it is important to show even little tidbits as reminders. :) For fictional, fantasy universes, that's one of the reasons why I love Game of Thrones/Song of Ice and Fire (and why it is so depressing). It has the advantage where it is told from multiple perspectives and the author really goes out of his way to show good and bad (and other) people on all sides. It makes the story feel much more real (and as I said, very depressing).

Yeah, I wanted to suggest it but I couldn't remember its title. Also I feared to mix it up with Le Pantalon, another great ww1 movie (if I remember well, a mix between Capitaine Conan and Paths of Glory), though that one seems to be a tv movie.

There was also a great film about one informal christmas truce in the ww1 trenches, called "Joyeux Noël".

Also, beyond films, there's the magnificent book by Jacques Tardi, It was the war of the trenches, a graphic novel adaptation of ww1 testimonies, by a french cartoonist who specialised himself a bit on that subject (and who happens to be one of the most important comics artists of our times).

Have you seen The Misfit Brigade aka Wheels of Terror? Judging from your posts you'd probably like it.

Ah yes, I keep meaning to see that movie. Thanks for the reminder. :)

Thanks, added to my "to watch" list ;-)

Thin Red Line was awful.

Has anybody mentioned Hamburger Hill yet ?

Why? Is it awful too? ^^