War is a conflicting film genre, and is the hardest to get right. To make a good comedy, you have to make the audience laugh. To make a good musical, you have to have good songs.
To make a good war movie, you have to tell an engaging story with an interesting conflict, while still being respectful and not diminishing the true horrors of war.
Perhaps this is why the list of great war movies is smaller than the list of great sci-fi, fantasy, or action movies. However, this makes the truly great war movies stand out that much more when they are released.
On paper, it doesn’t seem hard to make an exciting and realistic war film. You just think of a good story, with dynamic characters, and the “war” aspect of “war film” will go from there. However, there are many pitfalls filmmakers can stumble into.
The major one is that directors think that by making their war film extremely violent, it automatically makes their film antiwar. This isn’t a poor choice by default. It’s better for a war film to show war as very violent than try to sanitize it or tone it down.
However, to make a true antiwar film you have to put in more effort beyond blood and gore in showing how bad war is. And if you ARE going to use violence as a clutch, you’d better make it realistic and nauseating, otherwise what’s the point.
The 2016 film Hacksaw Ridge will be used as an example of what shouldn’t be in war films, because it stumbles into most of the pitfalls previously mentioned.
It stars Andrew Garfield as Desmond Doss, a combat medic who doesn’t fire or hold a gun at all due to his religious beliefs. During the war, he saves as many wounded soldiers as he can, and even helps wounded Japanese. He is an interesting character, and isn’t the problem.
The problem is that the film doesn’t criticize war beyond portraying it as brutal and bloody. It doesn’t focus on the moral depravity of war as a whole. It seeks to criticize killing, as evident by Doss’ pacifism, but views war as a necessity.
It doesn’t make war look pleasant, but it fundamentally isn’t antiwar. It doesn’t check the main box a war film should: to show the pointlessness of war for multiple sides and blur the line between virtue and vice in the context of war.
Hacksaw Ridge is a fine film. Its performances range from decent to genuinely great, and the story—while cheesy at times—is decently enjoyable during the first half. But as a war film, it fails, and the antithesis to it will be provided.
Paths of Glory, a 1957 film directed by Stanley Kubrick, is the gold standard for an antiwar film. Everywhere Hacksaw Ridge fails at being antiwar, it succeeds, on top of being a damn good movie.
Paths of Glory is about a French colonel who defends three soldiers against cowardice charges after an ill-fated mission fails. Its first third plays out like a standard war movie in the trenches, before it shifts focus and becomes more of a courtroom drama.
It succeeds at being antiwar because instead of focusing on the good vs bad of different sides, it shows how the military system as a whole is unjust and punishes innocent men for decisions they can’t be blamed for. The Germans the French are supposed to defeat aren’t even shown.
It also mostly avoids violence, which heavily works in its favor as the audience is forced to think on the moral conflict at hand instead of being burnt out by death upon death. It also makes the few acts of violence we do see very nauseating.
Ultimately cinema is subjective, and different people may look for different things in war films. It’s an interesting topic to discuss, and is great proof of how powerful and thought-provoking film can truly be.