War has always featured in literature and film, starting with Homer’s Iliad and Shakespeare’s History Plays (or indeed Troilus and Cressida) to the early days of cinema. Just think of The Birth of a Nation (1915), Napoléon (1927) and All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) to recent documentaries, including Ken Burn’s The Vietnam War (2017) or Sebastian Junger’s Restrepo (2010) and Korengal (2014).
There are war films, and there are war films. In this respect, the recent remake of Midway (1976) starring Henry Fonda and Charlton Heston called, unimaginatively, Midway (2019) also including an all-star cast is not particularly interesting, artistically or historically. The inside joke of depicting John Ford in a scene will be lost on most viewers. As a matter of fact, Ford’s footage of the battle (Battle of Midway) is in many ways more artistically valuable than the 1976 and 2019 cinematic renderings of the same event – even though it consists merely of original footage. For better or worse, many of the movies shot during World War II – whether staged or based on original footage, whether propagandistic or humanistic – raise many more interesting questions about reality and fiction, propaganda and documentary filmmaking etc. It is worth checking out Five Came Back (2017).
Hollywood war movies more often than not continue to bet on clichés. Midway is also full of tired clichés. As in so many Hollywood movies, Japanese characters are largely depicted as caricatures. (Only Yamamoto, the “good Japanese” who, at least initially, had opposed war with the United States, is partly exempt.) The Americans (and the Americans played by British actors .... why? To tap the British market?) are depicted as individuals, often heroic and valorous and always individualistic, while the Japanese characters are largely “ciphers”. In this respect, Midway 2.0. does not represent any improvement on Tora! Tora! Tora! (1970), shot half a century ago. Midway 2.0. even fails to resist unnecessary, but marketable human-interest stories, doing only slightly better on this account than the über-hollywoodized Pearl Harbor (2001). Midway 2.0. stands in a long line of big-budget, all-star cast productions, capturing pivotal moments of World War II, such as A Bridge Too Far (1977) or The Longest Day (1962). But it certainly does not improve on them artistically or in terms of historical accuracy, not even in terms of cinematography (in spite of all the extra technology available today).
Such are the limitations of the movie/ entertainment complex. Historically accurate and detailed renderings of key historical events such as Downfall (2004) or, at a lower level of command, Das Boot (1981) just do not sell as well. (It is worth watching Downfall and Darkest Hour (2017) side-by-side.) The fact that a surprisingly large number of the better war movies are German or French may be explained by the fact that movies in these countries need to be produced on smaller budgets and therefore can afford to be less entertainment- and action-movie-oriented. This may be beginning to change somewhat following the commercially oriented German production Generation War (2013), and who knows what Netflix and German entertainment companies will do next. Small budgets may be conducive to greater artistic quality. The nature and type of funding often affects the nature and quality of war movies, including differences in historical accuracy vs. entertainment vs. semi- or full-on propaganda. Just compare German Stalingrad (1993), American Stalingrad (aka Enemy at the Gates (2001)) and Russian Stalingrad (2013) as well Eisenstein’s wartime epics – though Eisenstein also proves that state-backed propaganda and artistic value are not mutually exclusive, while, perhaps, artistic value and entertainment-oriented productions are. Check out Alexander Nevsky (1938) or Ivan the Terrible I and II.
Journey’s End (2018) is an example of a compelling and plausible, artistically valuable, haunting low-budget war movie. It depicts a company of British soldiers during World War I bracing themselves for the last German offensive in 1918, and it is told them from the same vantage point as Dunkirk (2017) or Lebanon (2009) – that of the infantry (or tank) man facing a largely faceless enemy. It is also a comment on the senselessness of military bureaucracies, reminiscent of older movies such as Paths of Glory (1957). Relatedly, They Shall Not Grow Old (2018) is another recent thought-provoking, haunting film about World War I making the events more emotionally immediate due to the transformation of the original black and white documentary footage into colour.
War often forces humans to confront the extremes of human experience, including absurdity, courage, sometimes heroism, fear, terror, but also humanity and camaraderie, and almost always seeming senselessness and extreme violence. Some films capture aspects of the breadth and depth of such experiences, while others barely do so, often sacrificing artistic value in the pursuit of monetizable entertainment.