Top 10 War Movies Worth Watching This Memorial Day
Memorial Day means something different to everyone. For some, it’s the unofficial start of summer, cookouts in the backyard, a long weekend away from work. For others it’s a quiet moment of reflection thinking about the men and women who died in service to this country, who gave everything so the rest of us could have the kind of lives where our biggest problem is figuring out what to throw on the grill. I jest, of course, Americans today have plenty of problems to worry about.
For me, it’s both. And it’s also a great excuse to spend part of the weekend watching war movies.
There’s something about a great war film that hits different on Memorial Day and the lead up to it. The genre at its best isn’t about glorifying combat; it’s about the people inside it. The men who were scared out of their minds and went anyway. The ones who didn’t come home. The ones who did and had to figure out how to live with what they saw. That’s the stuff worth sitting with on a day like Memorial Day (which I know is a couple of weeks away from this post).
So here are my picks for ten of the best war movies you can watch this upcoming Memorial Day weekend, ranked from great to absolute essential. I’m doing this a little early because these films will be being reviewed in the lead-up to Memorial Day at the end of the month.
10. Midway (2019)
Midway didn’t get nearly the credit it deserved when it came out in 2019. Critics were lukewarm, audiences were middling, and it kind of just came and went. That’s a shame, because Roland Emmerich actually made a rather solid Pacific theater film here. The Battle of Midway was one of the most consequential naval engagements in history, a moment where the United States turned the tide of the entire Pacific War against Japan, and this film does justice to the men who made it happen. Ed Skrein, Patrick Wilson, Woody Harrelson — the cast is strong and the aerial combat sequences are impressive. Give it another shot if you passed on it the first time.
9. American Sniper (2014)
Clint Eastwood directing Bradley Cooper as Chris Kyle, the deadliest sniper in American military history, and the result is exactly as good as that pedigree suggests. What makes American Sniper work beyond just being a war movie is the way it handles the cost. Kyle is lethal and effective in the field, but every tour chips away at something. The film doesn’t sensationalize it and doesn’t preach about it either, which is why it works. Cooper’s performance is one of the best of his career. The fake baby controversy that followed the film on social media is more entertaining than most actual movies these days.
8. Patton (1970)
George C. Scott absolutely did not want to win the Academy Award for this performance, and he’s the first actor in history to refuse an Oscar. He said he didn’t believe in competitions between actors. You know what though? The performance was so good they gave it to him anyway and he still refused it. That tells you something about just how commanding his portrayal of General George S. Patton is. This is old Hollywood prestige filmmaking at its finest: big, sweeping, and built around one of the most complicated figures to ever lead American troops into battle. It’s three hours long and worth every minute.
7. The Longest Day (1962)
Three hours. Twenty-five big name stars. D-Day from every angle imaginable. The Longest Day is an epic in the truest sense of the word, the kind of movie Hollywood simply doesn’t make anymore because it would cost half a billion dollars and require actual ambition. John Wayne, Robert Mitchum, Henry Fonda, Richard Burton; the cast alone is staggering. What’s remarkable is how the film manages to hold together despite jumping between American, British, French, and German perspectives throughout. It captures the massive scale and absolute chaos of June 6, 1944 better than anything else committed to film before or since.
6. Full Metal Jacket (1987)
Stanley Kubrick’s Vietnam film is really two movies stitched together and both of them are excellent for completely different reasons. The first half at Parris Island, R. Lee Ermey’s immortal Gunnery Sergeant Hartman, and the slow psychological unraveling of Private Pyle is one of the most intense things ever put on screen. The second half drops you into the streets of Hue during the Tet Offensive and everything gets ugly and morally complicated in exactly the way war actually is. Ermey wasn’t even an actor, he was a real Marine Corps drill instructor and Kubrick cast him after seeing footage of him berating people. That authenticity is all over the screen.
5. Hacksaw Ridge (2016)
The story of Desmond Doss sounds like something somebody made up to win an argument. A conscientious objector who refused to carry a weapon, drafted into the Army during World War II, who ended up saving 75 wounded men during the Battle of Okinawa by himself by lowering them one by one down a cliff under fire, praying to save just one more each time he went back. It’s completely true. Mel Gibson directed this and it’s one of the most visceral and spiritually sincere war films ever made. The battle sequences are brutal — almost unwatchably brutal; and then Doss walks back into them unarmed and it somehow hits harder because of everything you just saw. Andrew Garfield deserved the Oscar.
4. Platoon (1986)
Oliver Stone served in Vietnam, and Platoon is his attempt to put what he saw on film as honestly as he could. That honesty is what separates it from the pack. This isn’t a clean war with clear heroes and villains; it’s a dirty, exhausting, morally corrosive conflict that consumes the men fighting it from the inside out. Charlie Sheen, Willem Dafoe, Tom Berenger — everyone is operating at a different frequency and Stone lets the tension between them become the engine of the whole film. The village sequence is one of the most uncomfortable things in American cinema. It’s supposed to be.
3. We Were Soldiers (2002)
The Battle of Ia Drang Valley in 1965 was the first major engagement between U.S. Army forces and the North Vietnamese Army, and We Were Soldiers puts you right in the middle of it. Mel Gibson as Lieutenant Colonel Hal Moore leads his men into a landing zone surrounded by enemy troops outnumbered, outgunned, and not going anywhere. What sets this film apart from other Vietnam entries is the dual perspective. The film cuts between the men dying in the field and their wives back home, receiving the telegrams, and it makes the human cost feel real in a way that a purely military focus never would. Sam Elliott is also in this and Sam Elliott makes everything better.
2. Black Hawk Down (2001)
Ridley Scott’s account of the 1993 Battle of Mogadishu is one of the most relentlessly intense combat films ever made, and one of my absolute favorite films of all time. For two and a half hours this movie barely lets you breathe. A mission that was supposed to take thirty minutes turned into a fifteen-hour firefight that killed eighteen American soldiers and wounded dozens more. The genius of the film is that it never loses sight of the individual men inside the chaos. This isn’t about policy or politics; it’s about what happens when soldiers are in a bad situation and what they do for each other. With Josh Hartnett, Ewan McGregor, Tom Sizemore, Eric Bana, the ensemble is incredible and everyone earns their moment.
1. Saving Private Ryan (1998)
There was never any other choice for number one. Spielberg’s masterpiece opens with twenty minutes of the Omaha Beach landing that will make you feel sick to your stomach, and then it keeps it going every minute of the two and a half hours that follow. Tom Hanks as Captain Miller leading a squad behind enemy lines to find and bring home one surviving brother after his siblings are all killed in combat; it’s a simple premise that becomes a meditation on sacrifice, duty, and what any individual life is actually worth. The ending is one of the most emotionally devastating in film history and it earns every tear. Watch it. Then go look up the real men who stormed those beaches.
This Memorial Day, take a few hours and sit with one of these. Or all ten over the week if you’ve got nowhere to be. The men these films are about didn’t get a long weekend. The least we can do is remember them.
Happy Memorial Day. Thank you to everyone who served, and to the families of those who didn’t come home.
Agree, disagree, or think I got it completely wrong? Say so in the comments or over at the Vortex Effect forums.
