What is the best WW2 Movie ?

i just watched saint and soldiers, same kind as when trumpets fades, i like it

 

Saints and Soldiers was a real disappointment to me. It was just another "men behind enemy lines" survival story instead of a real account of the events before and after the Malmédy massacre. They didn't even bother to get the units and topography right, and the British accent of the "British" airman was painfully fake.

 

spr,bob, das boot,the english patient,best years of our lives,the victors,thin red line,here to eternity,tora tora,the pianist,shindlers list,stalag 17,patton,all movies have some realism issues,as long as it doesnt overwhelm the picture,,,u gotta live with it.

 

ive read several accounts of german soldiers stupidly running forward to be cut down like wheat...no doubt brit ,yank ,french and every other army has done this from time to time...i thoght spr was another speilberg gem...of course as in all war movies the battle scenes were over done...enemy at gates was full of silly scenes ,,,german officers takeing showers,and reading newspapers where minutes earlier a thousand russian troops were mowed down..and wounded lay all about...the sniper shoot scenes take place at slingshot range...my dad ,retired col ,usa...belives the only war movie worth a crap is porkchop hill with gregory peck.....

 

Certianly porkchop hill was good but there are other good war movies such as Hamberger Hill (vietnam), it was pretty gorry. I do agree that most war movies are crap and totally unrealistic but there is more than just one good war movie.

 

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Enemy at the gates gets my vote. No movie is going to be completely realistic. The producers want to make money and that requires a story.

 

OK, finally saw When Trumpets Fade tonight. Outside of the bad acting, bad location (the woods looked more like the back of my house than the photos I've seen of Huertgen), unrealistic situations (spanking new replacements are suddenly Flamethrower Experts and infantry tactics from the Chinese handbook?), it wasn't bad....... :roll:

 

Bad acting - financial limitations, I suppose. The locations were quite what the area actually looks like, as far as I know - not from pictures but from the real thing. As for the unrealistic situations, the movie itself was clearly focused on just one battalion, in which decisions were small in scale, yet, since the tactical situation involved a bottleneck, large in consequence.

 

Can't say I ever made it to Huertgen when I was stationed a Fischbach b. Dahn, but every photo I've seen shows a heavily wooded area, not the light-medium woods the movie portrays. That's why the battle was so senseless, the American strengths of maneuver and airpower were completely negated in the heavy forest. All for the fixation of cutting through to the Roer Dams.

What adds to the lack of realism in the movie is the way the 28th Infantry Division is portrayed. The 28th was a very good infantry division, not up to the level of airborne but it had a solid reputation. The attitudes that were exhibited towards superiors would not be tolerated in a purely green division, much less the 28th. They wouldn't have even been tolerated when Jimmy Carter was President (my period). And a private jumps to Sergeant and then to Lieutenant in a matter of days or weeks? Couldn't happen. Audie Murphy, the most decorated enlisted man (US Army) in WWII, had to jump through all kinds of hoops (and not skip Corporal) to get a battlefield commission. Yes it's true that many films gloss over the "warts" in the U.S. Army, but producing a film with this many gross inaccuracies reminds me of the Allied propaganda from WW I describing the "wicked Huns" as baby killers.

 

And even this isn't a valid excuse. The Roer dams didn't even become an objective until quite late in the campaign. If 1st Army/12th AG had recognized the importance of the dams from the beginning they may have allocated sufficient forces to do the job quickly and not concentrated on a prestige battle like Aachen.

 

Tora! Tora! Tora!, Das Boot and Band of Brothers. If the last counts as a movie?

 

No, it does not - it's a miniseries. But I agree that it was great

 

Saving Private Ryan? I haven't watched any WW2 movies, but in the Guiness World Records 2006 entertainment section, it said that Saving Private Ryan was in 1st place for something. Pearl Harbor was in 2nd.

 

Saving Private Ryan demonized the Germans a bit too much for my taste. For example, during post-filming coloring, they made the American faces look "warmer" and "brighter" while making the Germans look pale and portraying them as shouting, mindless killing machines.

 

SPR was a good scene somehow cut and pasted into an awful film. The D-Day scene was quite revolutionary at the time, but most war movies are simply better in terms of realism, plot and such beyond their opening scene.

 

Yes i agree, SPR was using blatant techniques to make us hate the Germans and I disliked the film for that reason... still i guess it was from a strictly American point of view and the US soldiers would have seen the Germans in the same way...

Band of Brothers made the Germans seem more human, but still often showed them as incompetent fat fools with no military technique (e.g. so much German friendly fire) (squished by their own tank) etc...

 

smeghead, I agree, however... Being crushed under friendly tanks during a retreat was not uncommon. During the breakout attemps from Berlin in 1945, Anthony Beevor describes infantry hanging desperately on to tanks as they fought through the forest, often falling off and being run over, in the end leaving nothing but a red smudge.

 

With the exception of the German machinegunner who gets captured, almost executed, released instead, and then ends up killing Tom Hank's character, how are the Germans "demonized"? And this was just stupidity on the Captain's part, releasing him. Would I execute him? No, but I'd "kneecap" him (put a pistol bullet in his leg) which would put him out of action and make him a liability for his comrades. No the Germans characters are not "fleshed out" (let's see some Allied merchantmen's interaction in Das Boot then), but in actuality it is American soldiers who 1. "let them burn" with the flamethrower and 2. kill two Germans trying to surrender.

 

Well, how do you guys like Pearl Harbor? That had nothing to do with the Germans. Just the Japanese, and all the while they were in torpedo bombers assaulting Battleship Row and the American airfields. But, if you like the Americans winning, my reccomendation would be something about Midway. And Tom Hanks' character got killed in SPR? What a bad end for a good actor...

 

In what war-movie were Americans are portrayed did they loose :roll:
Must have missed those i guess!
Even in that movie Parole Harbor (what an awfull movie) they win
It's almost like only the US participated and won the war all by themselves!
Das Boat for instance doesn't have a good ending...
I wonder what war movie (about the allies) has a bad ending ?

BTW shouldn't it be:
Tom Hanks' character got killed in SPR? What a good end for a bad actor