A look at war in film
Emma Voelpel, Features Editor
The depiction of war is nothing new in the film industry. However, how it’s represented can be a contentious debate for moviegoers.
Cinema and war had a similar upbringing in the 20th century—from the start, the medium was used to sell conflict as much as to document it.
Over a century later, filmmakers still wrestle with the same question: what is cinema’s job when it points the camera at war—to record it or to condemn it?
Casablanca
Cinema is a crucial tool in shaping public opinion.
During the Second World War, the United States was on a high, and Hollywood was reflecting that.
The entertainment industry was working closely with the government of the United States to run information campaigns.
By the mid-1940s, two-thirds of the U.S. population went to the movies weekly. Meanwhile, Hollywood was using these extra funds to their advantage.
After the United States declared war on Japan, the Bureau of Motion Pictures (BMP) was founded, which produced features with themes of patriotism to boost morale for American citizens.
These depictions of America fighting Japan led to anti-Asian sentiment that spread throughout the United States and Canada. As a result, Japanese-Americans and Japanese-Canadians faced persecution from every level of government — jobs and livelihoods were stripped before they were displaced and sent to internment camps.
While these camps were opening throughout North America, the BMP was still pushing for support for the war effort, coining the term ‘the American way of life.’ The propaganda circulating depicted the draft as glamorous and soldiers as movie-star-like figures.
Similar efforts were being made to persuade Canadians to financially support the draft. The National Film Board (NFB) was producing countless documentaries of real footage of the battlefields such as The War at Sea and Canada Carries On.
The Canadian Government, through the NFB, raised $8.8 billion in war bonds through these efforts.
Platoon
In the 1960s, the Vietnam War came to be known as the first television war. The immense amount of footage being broadcast to TV screens in North America gave people a new perspective on warfare.
Public opinion surrounding the war was not nearly as supportive. American disillusionment was widespread, and now that television was recognising the true horrors of war, it was the film industry’s turn.
By the late 1970s, movies about Vietnam had been sweeping the Academy Awards.
Cinema began delving into more sensitive topics that hadn’t been touched on in previous conflicts. Critics referred to this era as the ‘New Hollywood’ as films started to have bolder subject matter. This shift saw the focus of war films become grittier.
Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket offered haunting and cold narratives of the realities of being entrenched in conflict.
Simultaneously, films like The Deer Hunter and Taxi Driver gave grizzly depictions of veterans broken by atrocities they both witnessed and committed.
However, although films were now capturing the emotional and physical unravellings of American soldiers, the geopolitical contexts were still missing from theatres.
There was a notable lack of films depicting the Vietnam War that were written from the perspective of Vietnamese people.
Tanner Mirrlees, an associate professor of communications and digital media at Ontario Tech University, told CBC in 2020 about the overlooked side of the conflict.
“These movies very much individualise and psychologize and pathologise the war, but don’t give us the bigger backdrop that would help us understand the forces driving that war, and the real consequences for those on the receiving end of the bombs falling—those being the Vietnamese people,” he said.
Zero Dark Thirty
The most recent conflict to dominate cinemas is the War on Terror.
After the U.S. invaded Afghanistan and Iraq following the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the U.S. was grappling with how to depict these events on the big screen.
The War on Terror served as a backdrop for many more fantastical films, such as Transformers, Top Gun: Maverick, and even the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU).
Nonetheless, films directly depicting modern warfare were as popular as ever.
In the 2012 article “Eyeless in America, the Sequel: Hollywood and Indiewood’s Iraq War on Film,” scholar Tim Blackmore describes a “partial history” that is a common theme in these films about American troops in the Middle East.
These partial histories are the echoes of what Mirrlees discussed: how the narrative is always told from only one point of view.
Films such as American Sniper, Brothers and Lone Survivor were all notable psychological thrillers related to military operations and fallout after them.
Following in the footsteps of films about the Vietnam War, many films continued to tell stories of what was happening but never why.
Peace sells but who’s buying?
One of the most recent films with this narrative is Warfare (2025). The film, directed by Rey Mendoza and Alex Garland, was a retelling of Mendoza’s real experience as a Navy SEAL in 2006.
The film plays out in real time as a platoon takes cover in an Iraqi family’s home during the Battle of Ramadi.
It is meant to depict a memory rather than an event. It isn’t meant to explain what is happening, but meant to capture the chaos, pain and absurdity of conflict.
Today, this is what Hollywood deems to be the safest way to depict war.
Over a century on, after cinema first pointed its lens at war, the question of how war should be reflected in entertainment remains unanswered.
