A Necessary Evil?

Along with Platoon and Apocolypse Now, Full Metal Jacket is the definitive motion picture about modern war. Kubrick's motley assortment of A-moral, immature marines seems almost prophetic when one considers the portrayal of most marines taking part in the current Iraq war. You be the judge. It was also the film that cast R. Lee Ermey into his signiture role as vicious Drill Seargent Hartman. Bravo!

The emotive imagery in Platoon did something which no other film in history has ever succeeded in doing: it made me cry! Whilst the narrative is thinner and more serious than its two contemporaries, Platoon's lack of spectacle leaves it with a grittiness that neither Full Metal Jacket or Apocolypse Now could ever hope to achieve.

Never before has any film ever tried to portray Adolf Hitler as anything more than a monsterous villain...until now. The Downfall's main strength is it's ability to present the opinion that the Fuhrer was in fact desperately troubled. The logic behind his refusal to abandon the Nazi regime suggested through this film is quite thought provoking and offers insght into the man behind the madness. Be warned however, three and a half hours is a lot of subtitles to wade through.

This film has now become renowned for it's blunt and uncompromising portrayal of the carnage that was operation overlord. Where as Enemy At the Gates takes viewers into the paranoia and solitude of sniping in an urban environment, Saving Private Ryan delivers the same break neck pace that we have come to expect from modern war films and the story is at times dramatised to the point of unrealistic in its stark opinions of good and evil. Despite this, it takes a brave soul to challenge the American romanticism of war and (whilst being largely over rated and over pretentious) Spielberg deserves credit for cutting the crap and finally telling it like it is.

Not really a war film in the conventional sense admittedly, but Roman Polanski's aaccount of one man's struggle to avoid Nazi pursecution in the director's native Poland is as emotive as anything devised by Kubrick or Spielberg. Adrien Brody's oscar winning powerhouse performance is testament to why he is currently among the great character actors of our era. Brutal, harrowing and brilliant in equal amounts.

This is an obvious rival with Saving Private Ryan as the best modern WWII film of recent times. Like Spielberg, director Jean-Jaques Annaud makes a tremendous effort to bring all the realistic grit, grime and guts of modern war to the big screen. Right from the outset, we as an audience are thrust with almost no warning into the violent anarchic mess that was the defence of Stalingrad. Jude Law has never ever been better as real life conscript turned sniping legend, Vassili Zytseff. This is easily complemented by the remainder of the cast. Joseph Finnes offers a more desperate side to his usual sense of Shakespearean gravitas as the Comissar that Zytseff saves from almost certain death. Rachel Wiesz is very likable as Nadia, despite the genuine lack of make up ( we get to see her ass! : D) and Ed Harris finds himself in full dread mode as the villainous Nazi sniper, Major Keorneg. The real acting award for this film, however, goes to Bob Hoskins, whose performance as future Russian premier Nikita Kruschev is not only realistically brash but also likably comic. Saving Private Ryan might have had more credit, but certainly Enemy At the Gates has more heart.

It's surprising just how many different shades of war film appear in Silmido. Most of the first act seems like a jungle version of Full Metal Jacket, complete with beatings, fatal falls and vicious military discipline. However, the remainder of the film seems to be a mixture of several other films including Enemy at the Gates, Saving Private Ryan and Platoon. The ever growing sense of unity between the film's doomed protagonists which culminates at the climax has a moving pathos which is extremely commendable given that for the majority of the film there has been terrible in-fighting. The message of Silmido is clear, politics and the military are an unstable mix and sometimes duty should be ignored to do what's right. Some may find its pro-Korean patriotism nauseating, but then all war films carry that side to them, don't they?

Jake Gyllenhaal is increasingly becoming the go-to man for contraversial tom-foolery and this is none more apparent than in this gulf war movie by American Beauty director Sam Mendes. Here, the Donnie Darko/ Bubble Boy star takes on the mammoth task of playing marine and borderline psychotic Anthony Swafford in this adaptation of his semi fiction account of his tour in Kuwait. Much like Private Joker in Full Metal Jacket or Chris Taylor in Platoon, the audience is left never knowing whether to side with Swafford or curse him. Much like his seductive sister, Maggie, Gyllenhaal cranks the intensity of his character way up to eleven as Swafford and his band of pumped up grunts run affoul of US military rules, disrespect authority and desicrate the values of their host culture in an attempt to stop themselves from slowly going mad. (Does this seem familiar to you?) There are also excellent supporting roles from Peter Sarsgaard (Maggie's real life husband) as the isolated though composed Kruger; Jamie Foxx, who appears to be chanelling Samuel L. Jackson throughout his part in the film, as a gung ho seargent and Chris Cooper's major who seems to be Lee Ermey mark II. In some respects, one could view Jarhead as a post modern war film. Postmodern in the sense that it has the feel of a genre war epic but fails to deliver the violence its audiences so desperately crave. Instead it prefers to play on our expectations to exemplify the adverse effect these films have on young men in priming them for war rather than detering them. As a war film, its a bit bland. As a critical analysis of serviceman's psyche however, Jarhead is very, very good.

Overhyped, but Gallipoli was still a good war film.