War is hell, but for the movies, it’s something more complicated. Some directors see war as a stylistic challenge, while others view it as an opportunity to drive home the trauma of the men and women on the ground. Netflix has a selection of war films spanning costume drama, science fiction, and recent history, all valuable in reflecting on the human drama of combat.
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The King (2019)
A David Michôd-directed adaptation of several of Shakespeare’s history plays, The King was arguably the first big-budget film anchored solely by Timothée Chalamet, whose two Oscar nominations followed shortly thereafter. Chalamet, in his gruff-young-striver mode, plays the young King Henry V during his invasion of France as part of the Hundred Years’ War. The sword-clanging action is pleasurable, solid, and steely in places and realistically anti-climactic in others.
Joel Edgerton, also a co-screenwriter, is Henry’s fictional drinking buddy Falstaff; most entertaining, though, is Robert Pattinson as Louis, the Dauphin of France, with an outrageous accent and a Lord Fauntleroy simper that make him a perfect foil to Chalamet.
Stream The King on Netflix.
Black Hawk Down (2001)
If you prefer your war films jaw-rattling and glamor-less, Ridley Scott’s brutal verité will be right up your alley. In October 1993, the United States led a UN peacekeeping operation in Mogadishu to capture the leader of a Somali terrorist group. A Black Hawk helicopter carrying a contingent of American Special Forces was shot down over the insurgency-torn city.
The men aboard were forced to fight their way out, and Hollywood came calling about eight years later. Black Hawk Down is suffused with eardrum-shattering gunfire and almost relentlessly unwilling to depict soldiery as anything but horrifying. A mile-long cast list led by Josh Hartnett heaves with sweat and anxiety.
Stream Black Hawk Down on Netflix.
Charlie Wilson’s War (2007)
Aaron Sorkin’s script for this Mike Nichols film, about the United States’ arming of the mujahideen during the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan, is Sorkinesque to its bones, down to the obligatory Gilbert and Sullivan reference. (Philip Seymour Hoffman’s sclerotic CIA agent, roaring out his qualifications, finishes with “And I’m never ever sick at sea!”)
That’s why it’s so curious that the story has the air of being unfinished, leaping from the meddling of one wily Congressman Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) to its consequence — the attacks of 9/11, carried out by the very men the US had trained — without deigning to trace the line between points A and B. Still, the film, Nichols’ last, is delightful, an absurd exploration of the backroom kibitzing that populates battlefields.
Stream Charlie Wilson’s War on Netflix.
Dune: Part Two (2024)
Director Denis Villeneuve has made plenty of films about violent conflict —2010’s Incendies (2010) is about the Lebanese Civil War, and 2015’s Sicario is about a CIA strike against a drug cartel. An artistically minded Villeneuve is drawn to the elegant warfare of science fiction. His two-film adaptation of Frank Herbert’s novel Dune tells the orange-saturated, visually stunning tale of an interplanetary war that is both technologically unsophisticated — our heroes fight with blades and crossbows — and high-tech. (The threat of nuclear warfare hovers.)
The action sequences in Dune: Part Two drift rather than rush and sweep rather than shudder. It’s war as a visual exercise, like a battle plan plotted on an otherworldly map.
Stream Dune: Part Two on Netflix.
Starship Troopers (1997)
A more literal transposition of America’s imperialistic desert wars onto science fiction can be found in Paul Verhoeven’s gloriously dumb adaptation of Robert A. Heinlein’s crypto-fascistic 1959 novel. Verhoeven wanted to make a satire — a film about an expansionist human species defeating an insectoid alien species called the Arachnids. The goal was to question the militaristic undertones of twentieth-century sci-fi by seeming to espouse them. In Verhoeven’s words, the film’s characters are “fascists who aren’t aware of their fascism.”
This metafictional component of the story doesn’t entirely work because the movie lays on the stupidity too thick to be entirely satirical. However, Starship Troopers is a rare film that seems to profit from its shallowness. It was made for a popcorn era that seems to have faded, with Verhoeven’s trademark borderline-softcore love scenes and a cast (Casper Van Dien, Denise Richards, Neil Patrick Harris) of surpassingly dopey gorgeousness. (Verhoeven says he cast the film to recall the preferred subjects of Leni Riefenstahl, the Nazi documentarian.)
Stream Starship Troopers on Netflix.