Real war story skin#
We got him up, and Doc pinched the skin of his head together, and we started to try to pull him out of this vehicle, but we couldn't do it. They were lying on top of him, so we pulled them off and looked down, and from the base of this guy's neck, all the way up to the top of his forehead, it looked like somebody had just taken a saber and cut his head open. We went digging around and found a live Marine underneath two bodies. I handed Doc half of a Marine and said, "Put this in the back of the Humvee because Marines don't leave our dead and wounded on the battlefield everybody comes home."Įven if it's a piece of you, I have a responsibility to your mom and dad to bring everything back." So, the Marine grabbed it, and his eyes were wide open, but he did exactly what he was told to do. There was black smoke billowing out, and we could barely see, but we started triage, and I went to pull a Marine out of the back, and as I was pulling him, his upper torso separated from his bottom torso, and all I had in my hands was his upper body. I said, "Lay this off to the side because we're going to find who that belongs to." I thought that if the Marine is still alive, the leg could be reattached. A disorienting, downbeat and unforgettable classic.The first thing I saw was the severed leg of a Marine lying on the ramp, so I picked that up, and I handed it to Doc. Klimov’s film argues convincingly that there are no heroes in war, only victims and perpetrators, and that no amount of guns and ammo will be able to reconcile the memory of the Holocaust.
Forced to survive alone in the wilderness, he suffers unspeakable indignities at every turn. After much deliberation, we thought it fitting to place this singular film at the top of our list, not just for its strikingly candid take on the human toll of warfare but as a work of sublime visual and aural intensity that uses every tool in the filmmaker’s arsenal to unforgettable and often nauseating effect.Ĭome and See is told from the perspective of Byelorussian lad Flyora (Aleksei Kravchenko), an army recruit whose plucky optimism is torn away as the platoon he’s inducted into are massacred. Making the infamous opening of Saving Private Ryan look like a Sunday stroll in the park, Elem Klimov’s hallucinatory masterpiece feels like the nearest cinema has ever come to recreating the ruthlessly discombobulating sensory experience of war. It’s an extraordinary vision of war, and indeed of humanity – godlike but ultimately sympathetic, exploring not just hearts and minds, but the souls of men in combat. The soldiers are viewed as individuals, questing souls on their own ultimately destructive spiritual journeys, but also as mere facets of the natural world, no more important than the plants, birds and insects that surround them. Malick paints the disputed island as a lost Eden, the two opposing armies as insignificant in the face of eternal nature. The overriding theme in Malick’s work has always been the transition from youth to adulthood, from innocence to experience, from paradise to reality, and this is no exception. Malick’s adaptation of James Jones’s memoir of the battle for Guadalcanal features Sean Penn, John Cusack, Nick Nolte, George Clooney, John Travolta and Woody Harrelson, with Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Sheen, Gary Oldman and Mickey Rourke left, amazingly, on the cutting room floor. So it was no surprise that on his return to filmmaking the Hollywood elite would line up to volunteer. Written by Tom Huddleston, Adam Lee Davies, Paul Fairclough, Anna Smith, David Jenkins, Dan Jolin, Phil de Semlyen & Alim KherajĬast: Sean Penn, Adrien Brody, Jim Caviezel, Ben Chaplinīy the time of The Thin Red Line, Terrence Malick had been languishing in self-imposed exile for two decades while his first two films, Badlands and Days of Heaven, grew in stature. War is hell, but the finest war films are anything but.
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So how to choose the best World War II movies ever made? We called in the experts – specifically one expert: Quentin Tarantino – and solicited the advice of those hard-working Time Out writers. The World War II genre includes Hollywood action epics and heart-wrenching romances , but it also features movies that build empathy for ‘the enemy’, like Clint Eastwood’s Letters from Iwo Jima. Indeed, the great minds of cinema were already hard at work documenting and exploring the war while it was happening.
But while World War II, like all major conflicts, was characterised by destruction on an unfathomable scale, the films documenting the war have been endlessly creative. War, huh, what is it good for? Well, between the bloodshed, aerial bombardment and displacement of civilians, not a huge amount (agreed, Edwin Starr).