Posted on 11/11/2011 4:18:37 PM PST by PJ-Comix
Today is Veterans Day so I guess it is also a day to discuss the WORST war movies ever made. Here is my list of a few of the WORST movies IMHO:
1. Battle of the Bulge---This movie was so bad and inaccurate that Former President Eisenhower held a press conference just to denounce it. Not only was it historically inaccurate with an absurd plot (a Boston police detective piecing together battlefield clues to help defeat the Germans) but the geographic locale was all wrong with the dense Ardennes forrest at times appearing to be a large western prairie. Okay, the Panzer Lied scene was kind of interesting but the rest of it was ridiculous.
2. Starship Troopers---Okay this was science fiction but did why did they insult the viewer's intelligence by using obsolete WWI battlefield tactics a couple of hundred years in the future? Drone rockets could have nuked those bugs without sending troopers in with machine guns.
3. Naked and the Dead---Painful to watch.
4. Thin Red Line---Hollywood attempted two versions of James Jones brilliant novel which was probably the best such book written in modern times and failed miserably both times. A tragedy since the book was incredible.
5. Pearl Harbor---Did anybody else wish that a stray Japanese bullet would have put Ben Affleck out of his, and our, misery? And the scene with President Franklin D. Roosevelt rising out of his wheelchair to walk was both painful to watch as well as laughable.
6. The Alamo---I wanted to like this movie but Frankie Avalon as the most unconvincing frontiersman ever, Smitty from Tennessee, ruined my usual suspension of disbelief while watching a movie. Frankie was way too urban for the role. Whenever I started getting into the movie, Frankie as Smitty kept ruining it for me. I kept seeing the Alamo but I kept thinking of South Philly. Also I kept thinking about Alamo eye candy, Linda Cristal, but that's another story.
Any movie where EVERY time they show Japanese soldiers creeping through the jungle they play that oriental tune from the Charlie Chan movies..
The book was better than the movie. At the end of the book, the humans vaporize the "bug" home world by causing its sun to go nova.
Why don’t you get on back to that faggot 1st platoon of yours!
The one thing I always wondered about the Playboy bunny scene, was if they had a army base/outpost or whatever way up stream, why didn’t they just start there instead of starting way back downstream and fighting their way up?
It was obviously safe enough to fly Playboy bunnies in, So why not fly the Swift boaters to there and cut a week or two off their trip?
Everything in the movie up to that point is pointless
Actually, that was what usually occurred. They took the train to Canada, where they joined up. They were then transported by ship to England.
Yeah, but the Japanese sailors had some spiffy duds.........
Any movie where they dress up a M-60 with iron crosses.
Here’s one that gets me. Civil War movies when the Napoleon cannons fire they just sit there - no recoil. So fake.
Battle of the Bulge was bad. Gotta love the end shot of the movie where the Germans are retreating after abandoning their tanks...and they’re retreating across what looks like California, not the Ardennes. Turns out they shot much of the movie in Spain, hence why the landscape was wrong.
}:-)4
You didn’t mention the even sillier political correctness in U-571, the ridiculous convolutions they went through just to get a black guy onto the sub so that the cast would be more “diverse.”
Thank you for mentioning that, it was also a part that was incorrect about the film, which I also was annoyed to see the same thing in the Captain America film as well. Old books such as Huckleberry Finn and To Kill a Mockingbird leave details in that political correctness tends to avoid nowadays, however, what’s more admirable is the exceptional manner that Atticus Finch demonstrated his loyalty as a lawyer despite the attitudes prevalent at the time, or the fact that Jim was humanized by his going after Huck and saving Thomas Sawyer from a gunshot wound. Again, avoiding facts about history is condemning oneself to repeat it, at a discount price.
I would actually also rate Alexander up there among all of my worst war films. The main reason why I am so against U-571, however, is because it is distorting American History by a stretch. I mean, the truth is, we cracked the Japanese code, we signed peace with them after the war, but then, when we ask that the truth come out, while we portray numerous aspects of our own history in an extremely distorted way, that’s just disgusting to me, especially when there aren’t all that many people around now to tell the tale about WWII, and that number is soon to be well, miniscule. Lying is about not being able to face up to the facts, our own media isn’t facing up to the fact that we actually fought hard on the pacific front, cracked the code, and deserve credit for it, even over 60 years after the fact. We fought the war, it happened, but it isn’t happening any more, at least between us, Italy, Germany, and Japan.
I totally agree with on both movies .
I don’t know if this counts, but I think the movie “Final Countdown”. Where the U.S.S. NIMITZ goes through some time warp in 1980 and finds itself in December 1941 in a position to stop the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
That’s odd.
“Master and Commander” is my favorite movie of all time.
Yeah, they cherry-picked plot lines from several of the books, but the movie itself is just superb.
Let me the be the first to add M*A*S*H* to the list.
Oh, and if anyone thought “Starship Troopers” was bad (and it was, but it was enjoyable), check out the (direct-to-video) sequels.
After reading the book, I could never watch the film to completion. The book was well-thought out, and was perhaps among the best of Heinlein’s ideas. The film was empty regarding the witty, intellectual value of the book, of which about half of the book was thoughts and flashbacks running through Rico’s head while he is packing adrenaline, I liked that writing style a whole lot. The film just didn’t measure up to that caliber.
Final Countdown was a POS but it had one great scene. The tub of lard congressmen who they picked up asks if only one squadron of modern attack planes was enough to knock out the Jap Navy fleet attacking Pearl Harbor. I love the reply. “Yeah, it’s enough”....
I thought that “Master and Commander” was okay, but the love story between Russell Crowe and Paul Bettany just didn’t work.
I passed that off as Just Plane Wrong due to the filmakers unable to locate a Focke-Achgelis Fa223. I was more irritated by the very long shot of them escaping supposedly in a Junkers Ju52/3m, so distant that it was unidentifiable, but the raising of the undercarriage could still be seen. You actually have the use of a DC-3 (used for the parachute into Germany scences), and can't do that off camera?
Also Richard Burton looking into the dark by holding a match 3" in from of his eyes. and the standard explosive charges, which, depending on script, either bring down half a castle, or cut though a telephone pole to fell it with surgical precision..
Maybe those are sergeant's straps... er, stripes.
I'm concerned about the perv in front with the video camera. Is he working on his new film "Crotch Shots of the Ukranian Army"?
Kelly’s Heroes was horrible as a war film, but the “Knock it off with the negative waves” was a cult hit amongst myself and my friends who watched it. Hey, you could say it was motivational!!!
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