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About War Movies

War movies deal primarily with actual warfare, usually featuring sea, air, or land battles and their combatants, or on daily military or civilian life in during battle or the threat of battle. Their stories may be fictional, historical re-enactment, docudrama or documentary in nature. World War II pushed the war movie genre into the mainstream. Many of the dramatic war films in the early 1940s in the United States were designed to create consensus at the expense of "the enemy". In fact, one of the conventions of the genre that developed during the period was that of a cross-section of the United States which comes together as a crack unit for the good of the country. British movies of the time tended to follow a similar pattern, depicting ordinary people joining forces for the good of the war effort. Hollywood movies in the 1950s and 1960s were often inclined towards spectacular heroics or self-sacrifice. The late 1950s and 1960s some more thoughtful and large-scale war films were made, such as David Lean's Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962), as well as all-star epics based on real battles, and often were quasi-documentary in style. War movies produced during and just after the Vietnam War era tended to reflect the disillusionment of the American public towards the war. Most films made after the Vietnam War delved more deeply into the horrors of war than the movies made before that era. - The preceding paragraph was derived from a full article available from Wikipedia and its use is governed by the GNU Free Documentation License 1.2.