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With Memorial Day fresh in your memory, revisit these films that found unique ways to honor soldiers.
Full Metal Jacket (1987)
“Full Metal Jacket” may be Stanley Kubrick’s most unnerving film — a Vietnam saga that aggressively depicts the transition of men into gun-wielding beasts. Everyone snickers at the f-bombs delivered by R. Lee Ermey’s drill instructor, but when a persecuted recruit, played by Vincent D’Onofrio, exhibits the treatment’s effects (and furthermore, when Matthew Modine’s protagonist goes on to grapple with it), the effect is chilling.
Black Hawk Down (2001)
Before “The Hurt Locker,” Ridley Scott gave us “Black Hawk Down,” another war film that embeds you so completely in the action, it’s difficult to process the fact that it’s merely a movie. Based on a failed Somali mission that erupted into the Battle of Mogadishu, and adapted from a book by former Philadelphia Inquirer columnist Mark Bowden, the film sees Josh Hartnett lead a stellar cast through whiz-bang hell.
The Patriot (2000)
Roland Emmerich isn’t quite what you’d call a respected filmmaker, but the disaster maestro does have his high points, and this underrated Revolutionary War epic is one of them. Mel Gibson plays a pacifist turned army leader, who finally fires back when two of his sons are killed (the elder played by Heath Ledger). Moments of grief are some of Gibson’s finest as an actor — and we need those moments to distract us from the rest of that man’s drama.
The Deer Hunter (1978)
If you’ve seen it, you certainly haven’t shaken it. This sober Vietnam drama, which focuses on Robert De Niro, John Savage and an unhinged Christopher Walken as three tormented prisoners of war, made headlines for its cringeworthy scenes of forced Russian roulette. But “The Deer Hunter” doesn’t grab one by the throat until the boys show how war has changed them — a war that felt like a gun to the head in itself.
The Thin Red Line (1998)
Terrence Malick’s masterpiece ties spirituality to war in a way no other film ever has. Many will call it indulgent, but the director’s cast of dozens (Sean Penn, Jim Caviezel, et al) superbly acts out his vision of combat as perhaps the most existential of experiences — on the edge of life and death at every moment.
Contact the South Philly Review at editor@southphillyreview.com.
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