Tag: Saving Private Ryan

Even Visceral War Movies Are Often Pro-War

W.J. Astore

Three anti-war movies worth watching

FEB 07, 2025

I was reading a memoir by a combat veteran today who served in Afghanistan and he had this to say:

“I remember watching the movie Saving Private Ryan with him [my dad] and all I wanted after that was to be a soldier.”

Perhaps you’ve seen Saving Private Ryan. The opening sequence is harrowing–a visceral depiction of war (the bloody U.S. landing at Omaha Beach on D-Day, June 6, 1944)–followed by a “feel-good” Spielberg gloss that follows a band of heroes that “rescues” Private Ryan.

This is the problem with war films, even visceral ones. Boys and teenagers watch them and think they’re cool; they seek the deadliest of challenges, even war, guided and motivated as they are by BS pro-war government/Hollywood propaganda.

It’s very difficult to depict war without valorizing it. The director Samuel Fuller, who served in World War II and made the movie The Big Red One, noted how movies don’t depict combat realistically, even ones like Saving Private Ryan. In his words: “You can’t see anything in actual combat. To do it right, you’d have to blind the [movie] audience with smoke, deafen them with noise, then shoot one of them in the shoulder to scare the rest to death. That would give the idea [of real war], but then not many people would come to the movies.”*

I love that description of a “real” immersive war movie. Now, who wants to volunteer to be the one who gets shot in the shoulder?

Obviously, you’ll rarely see “real” war in the mainstream media or in Hollywood movies because ratings and profits matter. Those movies that truly show the very worst aspects of war, without glorifying war in any way, are rare indeed. Perhaps one of these is Johnny Got His Gun (1971).

The scene featuring Donald Sutherland as Jesus Christ—his howl at the end on the train of death—is unforgettable.

Another incredibly harrowing war film that I’ve never forgotten is Come and See (1985). Set on the Russian Front during World War II, it is a shattering depiction of the utter brutality of war.

One more war film that is perhaps prettier than it should be but which captures the sadness and loss of innocence of the World War I generation is Testament of Youth (2014). The scene near the end where Alicia Vikander calls for an end to killing—an end to war—is heartrending.

Readers, what “war” movies have you seen that truly made you want to reject war in all its sheer bloody awfulness and waste?

*Quoted in “Reel War vs Real War,” article by Peter Maslowski, MHQ: Military History Quarterly, Summer 1998 issue.

On War Movies

W.J. Astore

The other night, my wife and I watched “1917,” a movie set during World War I. The Western Front was the setting, and the movie took pains to show the many horrors of trench warfare. Rotting corpses of men and horses. Rats and flies around those corpses. Huge shell craters. Barbed wire everywhere. Broken down tanks and other discarded military equipment. Nature itself blasted. It made you wonder how men could have slaughtered each other under such conditions for so long.

But it’s hard to sustain such horrors, even in a war movie crafted with such care. Because the overall story was a noble one about sacrifice, persistence, and endurance at the longest of odds.

Most war movies are like this. They may show the horrors of war, and do it viscerally and effectively, as Steven Spielberg did in his opening sequence of D-Day in “Saving Private Ryan.” But such horror can’t be sustained in what is ultimately meant as a form of entertainment, so in Spielberg’s film there is meaning and purpose. Sacrifice is ennobling. It is memorable and remembered. The hero does not die in vain.

I’ve seen war movies that have stayed with me, but no war scene in any movie captures the horrors of real life. And if somehow a movie could capture such horrors, who would voluntarily go and see it? Especially if they were not mere spectators but participants — with skin in the game, so to speak.

There are many good war movies out there, but has a movie ever stopped anyone from fighting and dying?

We make war into something larger than life. The irony is that war is most often the negation of life. Too many people die for no purpose and no reason. There is no dramatic arc. Only death and more death.

Yet we remain fascinated by war. Libraries are filled with books on war, and new war movies come out on a regular basis, promising drama and meaning and authenticity.

What was the last peace movie you saw?