When you think “best war movie of the 80s”, one film instantly springs to mind. I was dumbfounded, then, after compiling the list of Top 10 War Flicks of the Eighties, that Platoon was nowhere to be found upon it. The Criticker community — always full of surprises! (Platoon finished a still-respectable 11th).
This is our third top ten list since we began this new feature at the blog. We just thought it’d be fun to choose random genres and decades and see what kind of lists appear, based on the ratings of Criticker users. Are you surprised by any of the entries or other omissions?
jacobb1313 – Kurosawa’s late masterwork. From Shakespeare to Noh to Kurosawa’s own expressionistic painting, he uses all his sources to the fullest potency, creating a godless world of madness, war and death never seen in film since.
A boy is unwillingly thrust into the atrocities of war in WWII Byelorussia, fighting for a hopelessly unequipped resistance movement against the ruthless German forces.
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A tragic film covering a young boy and his little sister’s struggle to survive in Japan during World War II.
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It is 1942 and the German submarine fleet is heavily engaged in the so called "Battle of the Atlantic" to harass and destroy English shipping. With better escorts of the Destroyer Class, however, German U-Boats have begun to take heavy losses. Das Boot is the story of one such U-Boat crew, with the film examining how these submariners maintained their professionalism as soldiers, attempted to accomplish impossible missions, while all the time attempting to understand and obey the ideology of the government under which they served. (Sony Pictures)
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The story of an 18-year-old marine recruit named Private Joker – from his carnage-and-machismo boot camp to his climactic involvement in the heavy fighting in Hue during the 1968 Tet Offensive.
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With the help of government-issued pamphlets, an elderly British couple build a shelter and prepare for an impending nuclear attack…
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Three Australian lieutenants are court martialed for executing prisoners as a way of deflecting attention from war crimes committed by their superior officers.
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A dramatization of the probable consequences of a full scale nuclear war on an English community.
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When a powerful warlord in medieval Japan dies, a poor thief recruited to impersonate him finds difficulty living up to his role and clashes with the spirit of the warlord during turbulent times.
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An American citizen is trapped in Cambodia during tyrant Pol Pot's bloody “Year Zero” ethnic cleansing campaign, which claimed the lives of two million “undesirable” civilians.
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A conspicuous lack of Oliver Stone. Not only Platoon, but Salvador, and, less surprisingly, Born On The Fourth of July. Born may be too divisive and uncompromising, but Salvador seems like it would have a more universal film snob appeal.
Ah, the list
Be still my heart
My Achilles heel,
À la carte
Please dont forget “HAMBURGER HILL”
I feel like I never really got Ran. So many people say it’s Kurosawa’s best film, but I can’t think of one of his films that I didn’t enjoy more. I like a lot of bleak, uncomfortable, bloody films, but Ran just isn’t one of them. It did not impress me as being superlative on any front.
Threads, jeez. I remember when I was growing up, we had nuclear attack drills at my school, the threat was being broadcast on the news every night along with endless debate on the possibility and effectiveness of “Star Wars,” and who can forget those horrible world weather maps showing which way the Chernobyl fallout was drifting? The terrorist threat right now seems paltry when I look back on the nuclear terror of the 1980′s. That film, to me, along with The Day After, had a big effect. It’s one thing to know or read about what radiation does to people. It’s totally different to SEE it (along with cats on fire). Americans have the luxury of watching war movies most of the time knowing that we aren’t personally endangered by the conflict being depicted, but it wasn’t like that back then. There was widespread belief that almost every small town was a strategic target. I cannot underline strenuously enough how much Threads freaked me out.
Too bad I missed the vote. I’d have to say that Das Boot is my favorite war movie from the 80′s.