Top 5 War Movies

#1: Apocalypse Now

Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 Vietnam War classic that portrays the dizzying nonsense and the pure horror of war. The movie is set in 1970 during the Vietnam War and tells the story of Captain Willard and his perilous and increasingly hallucinatory journey upriver to find and terminate Colonel Kurtz, a once-promising officer who has reportedly gone completely mad.

#2: Platoon

Oliver Stones 1986 war classic which is set in 1967 and tells the story of Chris Taylor who leaves his university studies to enlist in combat duty in Vietnam. Taylor enters the war initially as a naive soldier who vacillates bewteen the opposing tactics of Sergeants Barnes and Elias. The different views of the two Sergeants ends up pitting the two soldiers against each other as well as against the enemy.

#3: The Dirty Dozen

Robert Aldrich's 1967 movie set just before D-Day during World War II tells the story of how Major Reisman is given the assignment of taking a bunch of criminals on death row and training them into a crack killing machine. Their mission is to parachute across enemy lines and assassinate German personnel at a French chateau.

#4: Saving Private Ryan

Steven Speilbergs 1998 World War II movie set during the Normandy Landings of June 1944 tells the story of a group of soldiers led by Captain John Miller who takes his men behind enemy lines to find Private James Ryan, whos three brothers have been killed in combat. After they lose one man in a skirmish some of the group begin to question the logic of losing more lives to save a single soldier.

#5: Full Metal Jacket

Stanley Kubrick's 1987 Vietnam War movie is split into two halves. The first segment captures the brutal tactics involved in assembling a bunch of raw recruits in boot camp for Vietnam while the second half shows soldiers in battle during the Tet offensive of 1968. The story follows smart-aleck Private Davis who is christened 'Joker' by the drill sergeant during basic training as he is sent to Vietnam as a journalist, covering and eventually participating in the Battle of Hue.