Platoon
Schindler's List
Apocalypse Now
Das Boot
Hotel Rwanda
Honorable Mention:
Band of Brothers
Gettysburg
The Great Escape
Saving Private Ryan
Platoon was the most convincing portrayal of soldiers I have ever seen in a film. The soldiers talked and walked like soldiers of that era, they used words and phrases in their dialog that I'd never heard anybody but my father say, I thought he made them up. Blackhawk Down tried to do this but it was compromised by hollywood polish. The result was inathentic.
Schindler's List for delivering so completely the sense of the inhuman indifferant regard of the germans toward the jews.
Apocalypse Now for capturing the unbelievable sureal insanity of that war. And the plausibility of the story. Special forces sergants were deployed individually to primitive tribes thoughout vietnam and were winning the war in their area to a degree that brought them unwelcome attention from the Army establishment. The soldiers became so ingrained into the villages that adopted them that they were very reluctant to be reassigned from them usually it would require a lot of threats and compromising. From their perspective they gained a great amount of sympathy for the villagers' bitter resentments toward both vietnamese governments. It's not inconcievable that the US army would have to deal with a rogue adviser.
Das Boot. The definitive factor of a submarine war movie is the suspence factor. Depth charges and dives, how much pressure and punishment are they willing to take before they break. This movie delivers supsence like it was ghostwritten by Edgar Allen Poe. All submarine movies since have been pale mimics. Visually it is quite convincing, no other naval warfare movie comes close. The irreverence that the veteran submariners display for military pomp is protrayed wonderfully. The one thing that bothered me was that the only nazi on the entire ship was the outcast, he wasn't even from germany. That's simply ahistorical and smacks of revisionism.
Hotel Rwanda. If it were fiction, and it's not, it would still be an excellent film in it's own right. The fact that it's a true story makes it even more commendable. Definitely a must see, and I would recomend the documentary "Ghosts of Rwanda" as a companion.
Band of brothers. The only bad thing I can say about it is that it suffers from the same inauthentic and hollywoodesqe dialog that really hurt Saving Private Ryan. But band of brothers offers so much to outway it's detractions.
Gettysburg. If you have any interest at all in the american civil war you should watch this. If you're not interested in the civil war, you will be after you watch it. The best civil war film.
The Great Escape. Would've been in my top five, would have been a great movie if the directors wouldn't have catered to the primadonna Steve McQueen. The other actors were tremendous, very believable, really a dignified tribute to the real life POWs that they were portraying. The studios wanted McQueen's face on the posters to sell tickets in America. So when he threatened to walk off the set unless they made him the hero of the movie they acquiessed and bent the film around McQueen's ego. The result is generally a very good movie between the scenes that McQueen stars in. His acting is bathos. Go back and watch this movie, pay particular attention to McQueen's scenes and ask yourself if his mimicry is more congruous with a serious war drama or The Little Rascals.
Saving Private Ryan. A very good movie if only for the action. Visually it is spectacular, a landmark wwII film. If it were a novel it would be a complete flop. That is to say, take away the cinematic experience and all you're left with is very generic and unrealistic dialogue. The characters were quite unconvincing as crack commandos of the US army's most elite unit at the time. Spielberg would have us believe that commanding officers of the ranger regiment were basically augmentees at the beginning of the war, not lifers. And that rangers in wwII were basically undisciplined average joes who are only in the military because of the war. In both Band of Brothers and Saving Private Ryan the dialogue is amost john waynish at times. The attempt at humor in both films is so inane that it's really just bad and way out of place.
