Taking the Movies to War: An Introduction to the Role of Film in Understanding War

The experience of battle is, as we are often told by its veterans, incommunicable. And yet, men (and a few women) have tried for millenia to communicate it through stories, poetry, and for something under a century, film. In the last thirty years, directors have developed more realistic techniques for showing mayhem, while the collapse of self-restraint has allowed them to use these new techniques in movies designed for mass audiences. The truth is that an active imagination was sufficient to bring home the grisliness of aerial combat in World War II to the average viewer of, say, the 1950s movie Twelve O’Clock High, which begins with a grim-faced adjutant recovering the arm of a wounded airman from a shot-up airplane. Insofar as war is about maiming and horror, it is now depicted graphically in contemporary film, and it is this vividness that, to the casual observer, makes modern war movies realistic.

Inevitably, however, even the best movie will fail to get it just right—after all, audiences experience danger vicariously, not in reality, and the medium imposes certain unrealities of time and experience. Very few films, for example, tell stories in real time—High Noon is one that does. No one can afford to recreate battles on a real scale. Even U.S. Civil War or Napoleonic epics with thousands of extras can bring together only a fraction of the number of men who actually showed up on a battlefield. Nor, in modern military movies, can one duplicate the vast and complicated armada of ships, aircraft, tanks, and artillery that shape combat. There are more subtle distortions as well: The Thin Red Line, for example (reviewed below), spends most of the time dealing with troops in contact with the enemy, where the book makes it clear that most of the time C-for-Charlie company is waiting in rear areas, moving up, or recovering from its ordeal.

Moreover, film producers often tell tales not about their nominal subject, but about a different one, transposing one military experience on to another. The Thin Red Line, for example, is in many ways more about Vietnam—or rather, a particular view of Vietnam—than about World War II. Its American soldiers invading an Asian paradise, its use of Vietnam-era visual clichés (some of the jungle canopy shots, for example), and its one-dimensional portrayal of the enemy as victims speaks more to a Hollywood conception of the Indochina war than of World War II. A movie like Pride (discussed by Michael Green below) also appears not to be an inquiry into that conflict, but an invocation of it for contemporary purposes. Unfortunately, in an age that increasingly shrugs off the quiet discipline of reading for the flash of vivid pictures and the rumble of high quality sound, movies and electronic entertainment are likely to do more to shape popular impressions of history than any scholarly treatise. As the discipline of history (and with it, textbooks and curricula in high schools) shrugs off military history as a subject unworthy of serious study, our idea of what war is about will come from the movies.

Even when films derived from great novels attempt to get historical details right they usually flatten or distort some of the most troubling parts of a story line—thus, Ted Turner’s rendition of Michael Shaara’s Killer Angels underplays Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain’s gradual realization that he is not so much interested in the justice of the cause for which he fights, as the sheer joy that he has discovered in combat. It is, moreover, a rare director who will take the pains of a Steven Spielberg or an Akira Kurosawa, brilliant re-creator of war in medieval Japan, to get the details just right—the look of houses, weapons, and even men (Spielberg having picked out Tom Hanks’ squad in part to get the kind of ethnic mix typical of World War II units). But as in other walks of life, there is genius in getting the small matters right...