The Best Movie Ever | Modern Warfare

For the third year in a row, the middle of January brings with it an ambitious film about modern warfare, based on a true story no less. Lone Survivor was a hit in 2014, American Sniper was a HUGE hit in 2015, and now in 2016 we have Michael Bay’s 13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi, a film that will probably make truckloads of money as well. At least, that’s what the studio is counting on.

But are any of these films the best movie ever made about modern warfare? Apparently not, according to our panel of film critics. This week on The Best Movie Ever we asked William Bibbiani and Witney Seibold of Crave, and Brian Formo of Collider, to present which film they could pick to represent the greatest dramatic depiction of our contemporary armed conflicts. They can only pick one film each, and as usual it ain’t easy, and as usual they can’t agree on a thing.

Find out which films made the top of their lists and why, and come back next Wednesday for an all-new topic on an all-new, highly debatable installment of Crave’s The Best Movie Ever!

Brian Formo’s Pick: Three Kings (1999)

Warner Bros.

War has changed; as such, war movies—set post-Vietnam—have also changed. If troops are on the ground, it’s substantially less than ever before. Soldiers aren’t charging out of boats, diving into dugouts or foxholes, but dodging mines and attempting to locate their enemy with night vision goggles. There’s been a masterpiece about modern warfare, it was made by Kathryn Bigelow and it’s called Zero Dark Thirty. It’s a taut, cat and mouse tactical search for the most wanted leader of a terrorist cell, Osama bin Laden. And it looks unlike any other war movie we’ve ever seen. 

As much as my brain wants me to pick Zero Dark Thirty, I’ll listen to my internal organs and choose David O. Russell’s action satire, Three Kings. Firstly, I can’t shake the brilliant opening of with Mark Wahlberg, Ice Cube and Spike Jonze out on patrol during the first Iraq War, spotting a man in the distance who might be waving a white flag or might have a weapon, Wahlberg stops and shouts a question over his shoulder, “Are we shootin’ people or what?” 

The main reason why I’m choosing Russell’s satire is because it’s one of the first films that crossed war action tropes with questions about what modern warfare is, what soldiers are allowed to do, who the enemy actually is, etc. It lands on “War is Hell” not just because of the barrage of bullets, but because everything is a gray area, objectives aren’t clear and villagers are too often put in crosshairs. But another reason I’m choosing Kings because it’s a rare action movie that makes every bullet count, even having cameras enter the bodies of our Kings to show us the damage it causes internally. Lastly, Three Kings is a rare film that makes the audience see things from the “enemy’s side”, even while they torture a captured US soldier; Three Kings has a lot of gall… and it shows.

William Bibbiani’s Pick: Black Hawk Down (2001)

Columbia Pictures

War movies are dangerous, in more ways than one. The very act of filming warfare on a grand scale has the potential consequence, intended or otherwise, of elevating war itself to greatness in the subconscious of the viewer. But even making a so-called “anti-war” movie has its drawbacks. Saccharine speeches about peace overcoming all odds ring distinctly untrue when all we see on the news is violence and horror on an international scale. 

There have been many great movies about the soldiers involved in our many modern wars. Brian already vaunted Zero Dark Thirty and Three Kings, exceptional films indeed. Ed Zwick’s impressive Desert Storm detective story Courage Under Fire deserves a mention here as well. But if I must pick a film about modern warfare, and if I’m not allowed to pick the incredible HBO mini-series Generation Kill (which is so damn near perfect it makes The Hurt Locker look like crap in comparison), I am forced to pick a film that is neither pro-war nor anti-war. Black Hawk Down is simply “war.”

Ridley Scott’s film, about the cataclysmic Battle of Mogadishu isn’t overly concerned with politics, and it only occasionally brushes itself up against philosophy. Black Hawk Down instead focuses on the intense experience of being deep inside a firefight. Scott films the chaos in all of its strange horror, and then Pietro Scalia masterfully edits it all together so that the audience is never confused, just awestruck. Such violence, such sound, such fury. Never before (and so far, never again) has warfare so consistently, hellishly wrapped around us. It may not be a great “story,” but by god is it great filmmaking. It’s the best modern warfare movie we’ve got.

Witney Seibold’s Pick: The Hurt Locker (2008)

Summit Entertainment

When it comes to tales of ancient wars – or even of wars around 50-years-old – there is a grand patriotic romance. The popular perception of World War II, for instance, is that it was morally clean-cut, and that the winners were on the side of righteousness, while the losers – the Nazis – were unmitigated villains who needed to be stopped. Films about that war tend to reflect that easy-peasy dualism. Once you move into the Vietnam war, however, things become a little more sticky. Movies about that war tend to be about confusion and trauma. Fast-forward to films about modern wars (i.e. anything since Operation Desert Storm), and they tend to be about the way the government manipulates soldiers, and how the soldiers feel increasingly disconnected from the reasons why the war began. In modern warfare, it’s all about the extremity of the situation, and patriotism be damned.

The best film to deal with the modern military milieu is Kathryn Bigelow’s 2009 Best Picture winner The Hurt Locker. This is a film that deals – on a very visceral level – with the strangely addictive extremity of a soldier’s life. We often see soldiers return from the war changed, mentally wounded in some way, unable to engage with the normal world. They’ve seen too much. The Hurt Locker shows us the “too much,” and lets us experience both the highs and lows of everything that implies. 

But the real emotional crux of The Hurt Locker comes at the end when our main character (Jeremy Renner) has returned from combat, and is trying to get back into the swing of run-of-the-mill domesticity. He’s not a hollowed man, but this life seems so far removed from, well, life. In a grocery store, his wife sends him to fetch cereal. He walks into the cereal aisle, and sees the hundreds of varieties. He is stymied. He sees nothing but a blank, meaningless American excess. His decisions used to be about life and death. Now they’re about hundreds of cereals. This is a very real, very moving moment that encapsulates modern warfare and its disconnect from this country in ways rarely seen.

Previously on The Best Movie Ever:

Top Photo: Warner Bros./Columbia Pictures/Summit Entertainment