For me:

We Were Soldiers: *****
Patton: *****
Saving Private Ryan: *****
Platoon: ****
Tora Tora Tora: *****
Midway: ***
Full Metal Jacket: ***

 

The Longest Day
Dirty Dozen

Not really great but a good one, Bat 21

 

Apacolypse Now

Full Metal Jacket

The longest Day

Lawrence Of Arabia

 

No doubt about it.....

Full Metal Jacket

 

Don't know if you would consider it a movie, but my favorite is
Band of Brothers

 

Don't forget the Band of Brothers DVD's, A bridge to Far, Black Hawk Down, Braveheart (still a war movie), Das Boot, Gettysburg,
Where Eagles Dare, The Guns of Navarrone, Hamburger Hill, Deer Hunter, Apocolypse Now, and even Gladiator. All in no particular order.

 

Man there were a ton...

Braveheart
The Patriot
We were soldiers
FMJ

the list goes on...

 

I have never heard of Full Metal Jacket, which war is it about?

 

Oh man, go buy it today. Its about marines in Vietnam. Definitly one to own.

 

Definitely "Saving Private Ryan" for me.

My father was part of the D-Day invasion and the opening scene of that movie (when they're crossing over the English Channel in the troop carriers) matched the description that my dad gave of the experience almost to a "T"......

He told me that many guys were so scared that they were literally shaking in their boots and some of them peed all over themselves in their pants. I'm glad my dad wasn't around when that movie came out, since documentaries about the invasion always seemed to put him into a little bit of a depression. I think that movie might have pushed him over the edge with it's harsh realism.

I remember him telling me this story about marching into a town called St. Lowe (?) and how it was completely abandoned when they got there and they walked past row-upon-row of frozen bodies that were stacked up like firewood. It's amazing to think of how many young men (my dad would have been around 19 or 20 at the time) from this generation got a BIG life lesson at a tender age.

I know I left that movie never wanting to ever see the film again -- it was too hard to think of my dad going through such an awful experience.

 

Yep, I know what you mean. My dad was in the Navy at 18, he was not shipped out till I was born. he was on a mine sweeper. Told some wild stories and could never watch war movies. I was 3 years old before he came back from his tour.

 

Your really need to see that movie Bluejay. It runs the whole pyramid of emotions from hilarious to the stark realism of Vietnam. Go rent it I guarantee you'll want to go buy it when it's over!

 

Patton for sure. Does Top Gun count???

 

Yeah, saving Private Ryan's- that push to get across that beach was a real *****. What's worse is, and what they didn't show that I later saw on a documentary, is not only was crossing 300 feet (maybe meters) of open beach, while being targets by blistering machine gun fire, was the fact that in some places, they had to scale on the face of the cliff, just to get to the Germans...

They eventually made it, but it didn't take minutes, it took hours. I think 3,000 guys got killed on that beach (Omaha) in a matter of a few hours- some didn't even make it off the Higgin's boats before machine guns mowed down the entire group.

So many dead an injured, that the water turned red, from bloodshed... I found myself, later in the move, actually getting angry, then happy when the GI's torched that pillbox with the flamethrower... Never more did I was I was a flame thrower operator as I did in that instant.

Those guys went through Hell and back- but, as bad as the bloodshed was in Europe, it was worse in the Pacific; but, no movies, to date, come close to capturing what went on in those island battles in he Pacific, as well as SPR did for the European theater of operation.

 

I will do it.