I remember watching the Nasser hospital bombing with my family during dinner. I hadn’t heard the headline: all I saw were men in neon vests manoeuvring limp bodies, moving carefully down the remains of a skeletal building before smoke from a second explosion consumed the screen. The image stuck not because of its brutality, but the lack thereof; nothing about it was like what war looked like in film. It was jarring to realise how war films had created an expectation of what qualified as violence, instilling within me abject indifference towards cruelty instead of immediate outrage. It has become undeniable that the war film’s relevance in modern-day media is perhaps, in some way, complicit in how we turn a blind eye towards real-life tragedy.
It’s no coincidence that many war films are labelled ‘epics’ – what terrifies us also compels us, and what keeps us more at the edge of our seats than violence? Take a look at Apocalypse Now, where US soldiers blast Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries as they prepare to bomb peaceful Vietnamese villages. Every element of the cinematography is carefully crafted to ensure maximum thrill – from each trumpeting note of the orchestral recording to the tidy formation of helicopters against the raging tides and the explosive payoff. Feeling excited about scenes like this isn’t a sin: it’s basic human instinct. But this instinct becomes dangerous when it evokes admiration and desire for emulation, when audiences parrot “I love the smell of napalm in the morning” without giving it a second thought. Once the rousing gunfire drowns out any attempts at anti-war nuance, the positive feedback generated renders filmic intent meaningless.
“What keeps us more at the edge of our seats than violence?”
In her essay ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’, Susan Sontag discusses the impact of images, specifically war photographs: “photographs of the victims of war are themselves a species of rhetoric,” she says. “They reiterate. They simplify. They agitate. They create the illusion of consensus.”The war film, when stripped down to its bare bones, is precisely this: a series of images, crafted meticulously in order to tell some kind of story. But since a panorama is not enough to make a film, the narrative nature of a war film forces editorialisation: incidents need to be cut, actions need to be trivialised, perspectives need to be polished. The selective imagery makes it easy for military organisations to co-opt these films as propaganda tools, seducing its young viewership into the idea of showcasing their fortitude and making their mark in history, without letting them realise its implications. In effect, impressionable minds grow increasingly militant in the face of international conflicts, glorifying combat with no regard for its long-term repercussions, while the war film goads them further into blurring the lines between ideal and harsh reality.
While some films depict the soldier as a charismatic quippy killing machine, others have chosen instead to humanise the soldier, exposing their vulnerabilities to shed light on the destructive effects of war. Films like All Quiet on the Western Front, which centre on young enlisted German soldiers during WWI, sell because they latch onto the human instinct of empathy. By honing in on the soldiers’ dreams of making their country proud and their anxieties for their loved ones at home, the audience forms emotional attachments with them, drawn in by their hopeful naiveté before taking a punch to the gut when they become increasingly disillusioned. One of the most distressing scenes in All Quiet is when protagonist Paul, trapped alone in the trenches with an enemy Frenchman, repeatedly stabs the soldier though he is already incapacitated. This frenzied action is a pivotal moment in which he realises the righteous cause of war he envisioned was never real: the trauma that comes with bloodshed far outweighs its glory. This despair prompts sympathy from viewers, a fierce protective urge welling up within us for these men whose moral compasses are trampled upon by their circumstances.
Yet films that evoke sympathy for soldiers perpetuate a different kind of danger; by extending sympathy towards an individual, it’s a slippery slope for audiences to forgive the actions of selfish higher powers. We don’t want to believe that cruelty can be intentional and its victims arbitrary, so we convince ourselves that there is goodness in every soldier concealed under their obligatory acts of violence: perhaps a misguided cause, or a desperate attempt to survive, or a desire to get home to their family. But just because every soldier has a story cannot be reason enough to withhold judgment from the atrocities they participate in. If we easily take any war as depicted by its on-screen replication and accept it as cold, hard truth, we feel compelled to pick a side and our worldview becomes increasingly radicalised, our perceptions running the risk of becoming skewed towards whichever country’s army gets more screen time.
“What picture, whose cruelties, whose deaths are not being shown?”
Instead of taking every scene of a war film at face value, the audience should consider a more chilling question: what picture, whose cruelties, whose deaths are not being shown? As the war film splinters the world into opposing factions, there is often a party left in the middle unaccounted for – the innocent citizen. At the 2025 Academy Awards, Palestinian-Israeli film No Other Land received a bittersweet victory, capturing Best Documentary following Israel’s cessation of all humanitarian aid to Gaza. Despite its filmic accolades, however, the movie still failed to secure a distributor within the US, clearly suggesting censorship barriers in place. Even so, this is sadly one of the few foreign movies presenting the perspective of the people that even have a shot at an international stage. Hollywood movies teach its audience to focus only on the soldier, to cheer for them or weep for them, but never to look beyond them. The more the film scene gets saturated by these movies, the easier it becomes to neglect the people caught in the crossfire off-screen still suffering in the process, gradually forgetting that they exist.
No matter what perspective a war film is shot from, there is – at the core of it – a perspective, which means that there can never be a true depiction of war on the big screen. Even so, I still believe that war films can be valuable, as long as we learn to discern truth from fiction. We cannot, for one moment, forget the political agendas that fuel a war, the struggle for power, the people that become collateral damage. If you want to watch a movie, watch a war film. If you want to understand war, look at the people of Ukraine and Gaza and Myanmar. Look at the governments that shrug their shoulders, at the organisations that shut their mouths, because the war film should not and cannot bear the responsibility of educating you.
