"Saving Private Ryan" tops list as best war movie ever

Hollywood has gone to war this holiday season. Specifically, World War II. No fewer that seven films set in and around WWII are being released between November and the end of the year. And with the highest profile picture, Tom Cruise's "Valkyrie," marching into theaters on Christmas Day, we have compiled this list of the top war movies, as voted by Yahoo! users. By comparing the average grade and the number of ratings, we've ranked your thirty favorites.

http://movies.yahoo.com/photos/collections/gallery/1344/yahoo-users-toprated-war-movies/fp#photo0

The older movies end up towards the bottom of the top 30 list, of course...i.e., All Quiet on the Western Front is #27, but should be top 5.

The producers tried to make it as realistic as possible. It should be required viewing for every student about to fill out his draft papers.
It wasn't a gore fest, not did it glorify war. It wasn't preachy or pretentious.

But it was very sobering. Kids who think the military is an adventure need to see it. Death is something very real, and very quick.

That said, my favorite old war film is "The Longest Day." (the invasion of Normandy)

The realism dies away somewhat after that, but the Omaha Beach scene is probably the best (or worst, depending on your perspective) battle scene ever to make it into a film.

_The Longest Day_ and _A Bridge Too Far_ are my favorites of this genre.

"the Longest Day". "A Bridge too Far" and "The Last Battle"---Cornelius Ryan's WWII trilogy are among the very best and most readable histories you will ever read.

to his time in combat in Korea (he was injured at Heartbreak Ridge).

I'd heard stories of vets who had similar experiences after seeing the movie.

:cry:

and collapses on the porch because she knew what was coming.

I've said that any politician that supported these wars should be forced to watch the opening scene and the scene with the mom over and over.

The scene was superb, but the movie as a whole was forgettable.

The whole premise after that was rather silly, and the production gave in to some common war-movie cliches that stopped working the first time they were used ... decades ago.

The action and filming techniques were the same. But where you had a realistic sense of the randomness of war with the opening, you had standard Hollywood, or even Spaghetti Western silliness.

You had all the main characters killed off one by one in sequence, a la The Dirty Dozen.

A bunch of token ancillary characters being wiped out in the background.

And the title character surviving along with the rookie character who finally learns how to be a man by capturing many German soldiers.

I managed to get past the basic premise of the story itself -- sending people on a suicide mission in an attempt to rescue one paratrooper -- but the way they did it wouldn't let me. The one-by-one thing just took it and made it a "guess which one is next" game.

I threw my hands up in resignation at the scene where Miller is dying. Firing a pistol at an oncoming tank? Really? Really!?!? I know it's supposed to show he'd resigned himself to his fate and was just sitting there waiting for it to happen, but something tells me even being shot up, if you can lift your arm to fire a pistol, your fight-or-flight mechanism would kick in to FLIGHT with a freakin' tank bearing down on you.

Really, it's the first 30 minutes of the movie that makes me notice this stuff even more. They set me up to think, yes, we took care with this one not to go all Hollywood on it. It's as though they did that with the first 30 minutes and then just gave up.

_Band of Brothers_ was much better in this regard. At least most of the cliches that show up in that are based on something that actually happened.

Recycling the same Spielberg ending from Empire of the Sun.

At first, for an instance, I thought they were going to try to make me believe the pistol shot hit an unexploded sticky bomb or something and blew the thing up.

The P-51s themselves were another cliche. They look cool, so they used them, even though they should have been P-47s, which actually were "tank busters."

There're only about 14 Jugs still flying, compared to about 150 Mustangs. (Both numbers may vary from 10 years ago, when "Saving Private Ryan" was made.)

Also, while the 47 was better-known for tank-busting and other ground-attack roles, it isn't as if the 51 wasn't used that way. Both planes as well as the P-38 racked up a lot of target-of-opportunity kills in the ETO.

It's just that the fighter group in that attack didn't have any P-51s.

Of course its worse than that. If you look at the scene of the planes flying in, they have no bomb racks attached.

The real reason they used them is, I assume, because they were more available, as you say. (It's an assumption on my part, but I tend to believe more of them are maintained because they're just a cool plane. I mean, it's the Mustang. The P-47s aren't quite as sexy.) And, as I said, I wouldn't have noticed such things as much if they hadn't set me up with the opening scenes. Even there they had some minor issues like this, e.g. the number tanks that made it onshore on D-Day, so, yeah, I'm just being picky ... and I have this really obnoxious tendency to turn spotting historical errors in movies into a drinking game.

I can't watch _Gettysburg_ anymore. I'm passed out before the battle even starts. :-)

and car-chase movies. I still can't watch "Pearl Harbor" without throwing stuff at the teevee, and I get eye-rolly at "Dirty Mary Crazy Larry" when the cops ID the first car as a "1967 or '68 Chevy" when it's clearly a '66. :)

I guess with "Ryan" I was so caught up in the story that I didn't think about picking the nits. Anyway, I don't know that much detail about Overlord.

but that's what war is all about. A suicide mission to make a political point.

Yeah, its stupid ... and we all know that our leaders never make such idiotic decisions, right? :sarcasm:

I just tend to think Eisenhower would have had someone's head on a platter for ordering such a fool thing at that point in the war.

wrong place

stupid! stupid! stupid!

What, precisely, were you thinking? :)

needless to say, I never had a second date .... :shrug:
just young and stupid I guess

At least ya got to see a good movie. :)

I made a girlfriend sit through all four hours of _Gettysburg_ once. This is when I realized I had a problem ...

I spent most of the rest of the movie and the rest of the day thinking "COULD I have done that?" and simply in awe of the people who did.

"Saving Private Ryan," "Full Metal Jacket," "Platoon," "Apocalypse Now," "Born on the Fourth of July," "The Deer Hunter" etc etc.

Heck, I'll even throw in "A Few Good Men" for good measure.

:crazy:

A Yahoo! poll? :eyes:

OTOH, "Saving Private Ryan" was an excellent film, and it's one of my top ten. But I haven't seen many other WWII movies, so I can't objectively compare it to them.

In 1914, during the first world war, here was a spontaneous truce amongst the soldiers for Christmas. Both side fraternized, exchanged gifts and played football. Much to the consternation of the generals.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vh6FL4z9lpQ

There's also a book on the event, if anyone is interested: Silent Night by Stanley Weintraub.

Glory is my number one, not because of the specific subject (black soldiers fighting in the civil war), but because it captures 2 ideas crucial to great war movies -- that war can be suicidal, and that political goals of war (or lack thereof) matter.

The Thin Red Line, All Quiet on the Western Front, Born on the Fourth of July, Platoon, and The Seven Samurai would all rate way ahead of Ryan.

I thought it was boring as hell.

I agree with you about the other films though.

He's an odd director and people either love him or hate him. The film asks more profound questions than a film like Saving Private Ryan, which despite the realism, is basically a melodrama.

Malick also made Badlands, Days of Heaven and the almost incomprehensible but beautiful, The New World.

And a very, very good film maker.

A wide angle shot of a hubcab lying in a ditch at sunset... an introspecting 15 minute take as Officer #5 wrestles with his inner demons...

They seem to fit in that vein.

It is a little known film about the Korean War, and it was very well done.

Go figure. I do agree that it was a lot more thoughtful than SPR, which after the Omaha Beach segment was pure old-school Hollywood WWII adventure film.

And Glory is near the top of my list as well.

I spit on this list. Ptooey! :P

where the troops charge down the landing craft ramps and right up onto the sand, I remember a quote from a veteran included in
"D-Day" by Stephen Ambrose. The veteran said basically: "None of us rushed off the boats and right up onto the sand like that. I was in that water for half an hour!"

Saving Private Ryan got that part right, at least.

...and includes a third-rate flick like "The Dirty Dozen," is laughable......

My father was a WWII bomber pilot. :)

And I don't really consider African Queen to be a war movie myself.

I'd rank 'Khartoum' above a few of those as well...

Pfffft.

Also, how about Grave of the Fireflies, The Guns of Navarone, Run Silent Run Deep, Kelly's Heroes, Battle of the Bulge, Tora Tora Tora?

I wasn't sure anyone else had seen that :thumbsup:

Pretty depressing though. :scared:

but would have worked better for me if I had anything more than absolutely zero empathy for the Japanese. Fuck em.

The idea that "Saving Private Ryan" even comes close is just...laughable.

Private Ryan is my top pick also. The first movie I ever saw that made me cry in the first 5 minutes, when he walked into the cemetery in Normandy. Some other real favorites are Glory and Stalag 17 to name a few.

I thought the top five should have been way down the list, or maybe even off it, but these sorts of lists always wind up with recent popular favorites at the top.

Still, a list with Battle of Algiers and Stalag-17 can't be all bad.

Not really' it could actually be the worst. I just wanted to make sure my message was read. :P

SPR is good but not without its faults but then again neither is The Longest Day to which is sometimes compared.

I find Stalag 17 to be terribly uneven in the way it attempted to blend comedy and drama. Give me The Great Escape any day over Stalag 17. There was plenty of humor in The Great Escape but it was often grim and dry. It just seemed more authentic.

I would vote Band of Brothers #1 but it's probably a bit unfair to compare a miniseries to a film.

My top ten:

The Great Escape
Enemy at the Gates
Saving Private Ryan
Patton
Full Metal Jacket
Glory
The Killing Fields
Das Boot
Apocalypse Now
The Deer Hunter

Are you high? They grafted a love triangle and an possibly imaginary sniper's duel onto the battle of Stalingrad. This has been called the worst time at the worst place in human history, so horrific was the suffering for both soldiers and civilians. Surely such an event could have been mined for a more compelling movie.

I think y'all may have missed a line from Jarhead...all war movies glorify war. It is inevitable.

and focused on the Stalingrad battle scenes.

http://www.snipercountry.com/BVT_Reviews/EnemyAtGates_Movie.asp

:evilgrin:

I'm not sure why. It's a very good movie.

And then Steve McQueen shots him so he can't be tortured ... that scared the hell out of me.

It's also got a love story ... one that doesn't work out ... a reluctant hero ... all staples of current war movies ... but rarely done as well.

This list is useless.

Although it was very good.

I'm talking about the 1993 movie. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0107007/

Maybe it's not actually a war movie. It's a war crimes trial movie. It's about some Australian soldiers brought up on war crimes trials for murder of several Boer partisans in the South African Boer War.

Maybe one of the most devastating indictments of the hypocrisy of war ever made.

Those two movies, combined, took any luster
off of the "glory" of war for me...

but in the 20s...

Really!!!

any list.

All time favorite war movie but it focused on POWs was Stalag 17, love that movie.

on that list.

My brother (a 2nd class Petty Officer) has said that this is the most recent Navy movie in which sailors are portrayed accurately. He said that current movies about the Navy are of tomfoolery or officers behaving badly.

he's right. It took the Germans to do it right. And I don't recall any other Navy film in recent memory that does these guys justice.

It's one of my favorite movies of any genre.

There's another German made movie that looks to be just as good. I've only seen clips of it on youtube so far. It too, preceded "Saving Private Ryan" and it looks like Steven Spielberg was influenced by it's realism and the use of severely subdued color. Here's a paragraph from a review of the movie:

"With graphic depictions of battlefield horrors, Vilsmaier's film is the dark side of Stephen Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan." Unlike Spielberg, Vilsmaier felt no need to make his characters heroic since the reputation of the Wehrmacht is beyond salvation. His goal instead was to dramatize the suffering of the everyday German soldier in a war that had no redeeming qualities. Unlike the flag-waving Spielberg, Vilsmaier dramatizes men who kill only to avoid being killed themselves, and who, when they finally decide to desert, attain a level of humanity that had been denied them up to that point. Unlike Spielberg's wretched war-hawk lead-actor Tom Hanks who dies in the final scene holding off a German tank with a pistol, the two lead characters of "Stalingrad" die in each other's arms during a blizzard, in desperate flight from the action."

Here's a link to a clip on youtube, it's in German, but still compelling. I'd like to get a version with English subtitles (I hate dubbing): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uXNrYoO-7qU&NR=1

http://ia.media-imdb.com/images/M/MV5BMjE4NzQ2NzE5OF5BMl5BanBnXkFtZTcwMzUzMTUyMQ@@._V1._SX100_SY136_.jpg

For a movie that really deals with larger truths, this is great. Saw it when it came out

with Erol Flynn and David Niven as well as

Bridge over the River Kwai
my mother was in the Red Cross in that particular theatre in 1944

Burma - 1945

Those are my top two. The only good war movie is one that shows how idiotic it is both in concept and execution. I'm surprised they made the list. Lawrence of Arabia is a favorite of mine too but I never think of it as a war movie for some reason.

oh yeah i forgot it was internet voting...the same people who made "The Dark Knight" the highest rated movie in the entire IMDB...

half of that top-10 list needs to be dropped, and several movies in the top 30 are LONG stretches to call "war movies"

... maybe not as good as the book, but that can be said of a lot of movies.

Like "We Were Soldiers Once, And Young", where the movie covered the first (and easiest) part of the book and battle. The miracle shoot-em-up charge at the enemy tunnel complex was good theatrics, but doesn't follow the book or battle.

Is my favorite. We use to recite lines from that movie verbatim when I was in the Corps.

I liked Black Hawk Down more than Saving Private Ryan.

with Audie Murphy. Mostly because my dad was an extra in that movie.