Movies That Most Accurately Depict the Brutality of War

They say all is fair in love and war. But the brutal tactics employed in the latter never seem fair. War is violent. Chaotic. Capable of miserable effects in the short and long terms.

And these films serve as acute examinations of the hellish brutality that occurs in all warfare…

Apocalypse Now

Here’s how Francis Ford Coppola described the making of “Apocalypse Now”: “We had access to too much money, too much equipment, and little by little we went insane.” The insanity of production combined with the insanity of the Vietnam War, the film’s subject, results in a hallucinatory, feverish work of art, juxtaposing surreal violence with borderline absurd comedy.

The film works on both visceral and cerebral levels of anxiety.

Grace Is Gone

Not every war is fought on the battlefield. And not every war is fought by a soldier. In “Grace Is Gone,” John Cusack plays a husband whose wife is killed in action in the Iraq War. He’s thus given an impossible task: How do you tell your two children that their mother is dead?

The film explores the quiet, mundane brutality in a life post-war, a life post-death. Even the happiest moments are tinged with melancholy.

Full Metal Jacket

Stanley Kubrick’s “Full Metal Jacket,” the filmmaking maestro’s examination of the Vietnam War, is effectively split into two chapters. The first chapter depicts the interior deterioration of young soldiers’ psychological states of beings, thanks to a drill sergeant’s unending abuse.

The second chapter expands and takes us into the physical realm, showing what happens when these broken men are taken into broken places and asked to do broken things.

The Hurt Locker

At any second, your life could end. That’s the lesson at the crux of all of war’s existential crises. And in “The Hurt Locker,” centered around an bomb disposal team in the Iraq War, this lesson is shown in unbearably agonizing detail.

Kathryn Bigelow’s nail-biter plays like a suspense thriller, action film and psychological character study all at once. It won the Academy Award for best picture, deservedly so.