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War Movies

Throughout film history, war films have stirred emotions of viewers as they portray the horror of war. Even "flag-waving" war films that basically avoid the reality and horrors of combat and death are designed to heighten emotions. The 1941 Sergeant York, and the many John Wayne World War II war films were sentimental productions meant to promote heroic patriotism; realistic depictions of the blood and emotional scarring of battle were not seen on the screen. In the late 20th Century, however, a new order of war movies was produced that dealt more realistically with the impact of war on the armed forces, the veterans and the civilian populations.

Filmmaker Steven Spielberg broke ground with his visionary expression of war atrocities with his release in 1993 of Schindler's List. Utilizing the memories, pictorials and film footage of actual Holocaust survivors, he created a fictionalized version of the story of German industrialist Oskar Schindler, a man who saved thousands of Jews by offering them work in his factories. The creation of a legend was born. He followed this war epic with Saving Private Ryan (1998), a realistic film devoted to the story of a group of World War II soldiers who, after landing on Normandy Beach on D-Day, are ordered into enemy territory to find a private who is the last remaining progeny of his family of brothers. This, too, was a fictionalized story based on fact. Once again, Speilberg focused on war atrocities, creating what is considered to be the most realistic portrayal of D-Day to date by those survivors who were there.

The purpose of these films is to highlight the horrors of war with the express purpose of extracting an emotional reaction in the hope that war will not happen again. While this may be true, and it may affect some in this fashion, movies have served more of a purpose in creating war legends in a genre that is extremely popular and continues to flourish.

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War Movies. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 17:26, March 28, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1700441.html