War Is Hell / Live-Action Films

War. War never changes.

War Is Hell in Films.

---

• 1917: Dead and decomposed bodies are a frequent sight, as are wounded and shell-shocked soldiers. The actual combat scenes are relatively brief and far from glamorous. Schofield clearly holds this view as the more experienced soldier and having survived the horrors of the Somme.
• Played word for word in Ace Ventura: When Nature Calls, when the pet detective says the following words to the native Wachoochoo tribe:
  "War...is hell! The last thing we want...is a fight!"
  • Which his partner, one of the native Wachatis, translates as "I want to fight you...so go to hell!"
• Across the Universe (2007): Part of the plot is about the horrors of the Vietnam War. One part in particular is pretty nightmarish, with Max shown in a red-lit scene as he fires wildly around him with his eyes wide in terror, screaming "Die!" at unseen targets.
• All Quiet on the Western Front is a 1930 war film set in World War I about several German graduates who naively choose to go to war only to find a world of brutal training and pointless death. It is also considered one of the greatest films ever made, and one of the finest anti-war films ever made, if not the best. The fight scenes are so realistic that they are still being used in documentaries about WWI to this day.
  • Other versions were made in 1979 and 2022, and they don't pull punches either on the horrible sides of war.
• Referenced in Arrival: General Chang's wife's last words were "War does not make winners, only widows." When Louise Banks learns this from General Chang in the future, she contacts him in the present and with those words convinces him to stand down.
• The Polish film Ashes and Diamonds: Alliances not built on trust will quickly crumble. Another war begins just as another ends.
• The Battle of San Pietro is a 1945 U.S. Army documentary film showing the bloody, brutal battle for the eponymous town. The many shots of corpses, both dead American soldiers and dead Italian civilians, including children, nearly got the film banned. Only the intervention of Chief of Staff George C. Marshall got the film shown to the public.
• Black Hawk Down: A war where the people you are nominally fighting for are also the enemy: the experience of fighting an unwinnable war. Also see War Is Glorious, for the other side of the story.
• Blood Diamond shows exactly how bad things can get when the revolution isn't civilized: entire villages are killed, mutilated, or taken as slave labor to support the violent revolutionaries. Children are kidnapped and indoctrinated into being Child Soldiers, while their families are murdered so they have nowhere else to go, and the kids are hooked on drugs so they can murder without conscience or feeling, after which they are set loose with AKs to wipe out more villages just like their own. Civilians who were partying in a seemingly safe city one day are fleeing for their lives or being murdered indiscriminately the next day when the rebels take it by surprise, complete with desecrated corpses being left in the street or further mutilated for fun while women are raped in nearby buildings.
• 1916 anti-war film Civilization presents savage, vicious battle sequences, with vicious trench warfare, civilians getting caught in the crossfire, dogs rooting through corpses.
• Interestingly, Troma got in on this trope with Combat Shock, an extremely brutal and bleak depiction of The Vietnam War and one veteran's attempt to rebuild his life. He ends up having a flashback and murdering his wife and young child. He snaps out of it, realizes what he just did, and kills himself.
• The Soviet film Come and See is this trope incarnate, being about a little boy turned partisan during World War II. It ends in insanity and shows incredible cruelty on both sides. The title itself is a reference to the biblical Apocalypse.
• The Cranes Are Flying is all about the toll that World War II took on the Soviet Union, seen from the perspective of a young woman whose parents and fiance are killed and who is raped along the way.
• Hunter and Ramsey discuss the theories and philosophy of Von Clausewitz over dinner in Crimson Tide. Hunter comes to the conclusion not that War is Hell, but that War is Doom. ^note He must have been keeping these opinions to himself up until now: the U.S Navy isn't that keen on pacifist officers. Still, the psychological toll on the crew of the imminence of nuclear launch (and the ramifications thereof), of damage taken, and the known presence but unknown location of enemy attack submarines is clearly portrayed.
  Hunter: In my humble opinion, in the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself.
• The Crossing: The Darkest Hour for the Continental army. It's cold, wet winter, men are forced to march while sick and wounded and shoeless, thoroughly trounced and dispirited by their failures against the British army. The fighting is brutal and bloody to the degree that you wince on behalf of the Hessians, even knowing that some of these men shot down Washington's own troops when they tried to surrender.
• Cross of Iron; a squad of war weary German veterans are on the eastern front in 1943.
• Das Boot: Set in 1942, follows the story of a real life German submarine and its crew. Few movies manage to convey a sense of terror, futility and frustration all at once and with such skill.
• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: The look on Blue Eyes face as he watches waves of his fellow apes get gunned down in a head on charge against an entrenched enemy in the name of revenge says it all.
• Die Brücke. During the final days of WW2, a number of freshly-drafted and (at first) still enthusiastic German kids fight and die one by one in order to hold an ultimately irrelevant bridge against the American advance.
• Downfall (2004) is centered on the tragic final battle in Europe, The Battle of Berlin. For the Germans, this is an apocalyptic nightmare as they are outnumbered and overwhelmed by the approaching Red Army. The Soviets are portrayed as relentless, continuously shelling the buildings into fiery ruins and pushing deeper into the center of Berlin with every passing hour. The German defenses has been reduced to young children and old men with poor equipment, dying senselessly against the enemy in already lost battle. And if that's not bad enough, fanatical Nazis are prowling on the streets, killing any German who doesn't fight the Soviets. And all of this is due to Hitler's refusal to retreat or surrender. The arrogance of the German generals becomes so extreme that they are willing to deny surrendering for as long as possible, leading to thousands more dying pointlessly while other fanatical Nazis commit suicide. The finale of the war in Europe is nothing more than malicious and terrifying as the Third Reich crumbles under the very war it started.
• Being based on the battle of El-Alamein from the Italian point of view, it comes to nobody's surprise that El Alamein: The Line of Fire has this. What does surprise is the vicious efficiency they do it with: as the protagonist Serra is being brought to his unit by a Bersagliere on a motorbike we're treated to the Bersagliere being overjoyed when he scavenges a quarter liter of fuel from some abandoned vehicles and warning him of keeping his canteen of pure water (rare in the first line) safe (two veterans steal it at the end of the first scene), and it only goes downhill from there.
• While The Enemy Below is more a straight war-adventure-suspense story, it does touch on the aspects: Captain Murrell lost his British wife to a u-boat when he was trying to evacuate her from Britain on his ship when he was a merchant mariner. Von Stolberg has lost his son in battle, and doubts he's on the right side of the war. The two of them — honorable, intelligent, and compassionate men who respect each other's abilities — spend most of the film trying to kill each other.
• The pair of movies Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima show this viewpoint when taken together. Both movies present war fairly honestly from each sides' perspective and could be taken to glorify war individually. However, watching a movie where you sympathize with the characters and their motivations on one side of the most bloody and desperate battles in World War II, then watch a movie where you sympathize with characters and their motivations on the other side of the same combat, and realize that there is no possible way things can turn out better for one group without terrible, terrible things having happened to the other... well that is pretty effective.
• Flowers of War: Set during the Rape of Nanjing it shows the effect of what can happen when Chinese civilians, school girls and prostitutes alike, are left at the mercy of a heartless and depraved Japanese occupation force.
• Forrest Gump wanted to tell a rally about his horrifc experiences in Vietnam but the sound equipment was sabotaged. By the time it was fixed, all the crowd heard was "That's all I have to say about that" which is his euphemism for when his stories are too sad to continue telling.
• Free State of Jones: Newt firmly believes this after having seen fighting up close, carrying wounded soldiers off to surgery, in contrast with others, and feels that his nephew was killed for nothing.
• Fury is the result of World War Two meeting the ultra-realistic style of filmmaking in 2014. Nothing about the war is portrayed as glorious or inspirational, but the whole thing is instead shown as a giant, soul-destroying bowl of misery and horror. Shocking and cruel ways to die and war crimes happen countless times every day, including but not limited to: people burning alive inside a tank, people being run over by tanks, the use of Child Soldiers, the summary execution of war criminals (and sometimes just ordinary soldiers who rubbed the enemy the wrong way or were in the wrong place at the wrong time), the terrorizing and murder of civilians to force them to fight a doomed war, the Nazis shelling or burning down entire towns and cities for surrendering to the Americans, soldiers having sex with civilian women with Questionable Consent, etc. Even barely focused on background moments can show the horror at work, such as at the beginning of the movie when the crew of the tank "Fury" returns to base and forklifts are seen in the background piling dead bodies into a mass grave. What makes it especially jarring is that it's set in April 1945, and everyone in the film knows that the war in the European theatre is over and it is absolutely impossible for Germany to win (Hitler's suicide and the surrender of Germany is only a few weeks away at most), and yet fanatics still go out to fight and die for (or force others to fight and die for) something that's already a foregone conclusion. The deleted scenes make things even grimmer, as it shows more of the horrific toll that years of combat have taken on the Fury's crew, explains why Don is such a Death Seeker, and features other cheerful events like driving past a field full of concentration camp victims who were either executed or dropped dead while being marched from one camp to another. For an idea of just how brutally the war is portrayed, here is one veteran of the Fury's crew telling New Meat Norman about what they did after arriving in France after D-Day.
  Gordo: Hey, in France, we hit the beach right after D-Day. We finally hit open country, and we hooked up with the British and the Canadians and you know what we did? We trapped an entire Kraut army pulling back into Germany. We fucked them up. There was dead Krauts and horses, busted up tanks and cars for miles. Miles. Your eyes see it, but your head can't make no sense of it. And we go in there... and for three whole days, [voice quivering] we shoot the wounded horses. All day long, just sunup to sundown, shooting horses. And they were some hot summer days.
  Bible: [silently crying as he speaks] I ain't never smelled nothing like that.
  Gordo: You know how you kill a horse? You-you pet it on the forehead, no? And it becomes your friend. And then you shoot it, right through the spine. And the sound of it? The fucking screaming horses? All the black clouds of flies just buzzing around? It was like being in a giant beehive. But you weren't there.
• Gallipoli: exuberant and naive boys from outback Australia go to war. Their illusions are shattered in the botched assault landings at Gallipoli.
• Gettysburg: Depicting a battle in which over 50,000 men were killed or wounded over three days. The 20th Maine started with 1,000 men and has been cut down to 300 because the Union is just using them until there's no one left. Bodies carpet the battlefield and medical treatment is almost as dangerous as going into battle in the first place. Old friends who are like brothers are forced to fight each other, and Pickett's Charge is a hideous mistake that leaves ten thousand men dead on the field.
• In The Giver, one of the memories Jonas receives *by accident, as The Giver transmitted it to him by mistake during a PTSD flashback) is of The Vietnam War.
• Godzilla (1954) is what happens when you take the tragedies of post-war Japan, and transform it into a Kaiju film. The film does not sugarcoat the hell the Japanese went through during World War II, and one of its main characters is a Shell-Shocked Veteran. The film is also a re-enactment to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but it also treats the titular monster as a victim to the same nuclear warfare as Japan did.
• Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): According to the Creative Closing Credits, Advanced Ancient Humans provoked the Titans into warring with them when the humans in question grew proud and attempted to enslave as weapons of war the very creatures their civilization had once worshipped. At the end of the resulting conflict (which triggered one of the last ice ages), both sides had suffered losses – despite the Titans' Nigh-Invulnerability and vast physical superiority to humans, the cataclysm was just that bad.
• The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: The American Civil War is integral to the fabric of the film, and Leone is here to serve it up raw. It is remarkable that film known primarily as a classic Western would use this as a core theme. Tattered armies in retreat. Exhausted, demoralized drunken commanders, chaos, dirt and unregarded bodies left out in the sun. Corn cobs to eat, scabrous prison camps, and summary justice meted out on the streets. The POW camp commander mentions Andersonville Prison, a hell-on-Earth death camp. He also berates Angel Eyes for the organized torture and theft of money and valuables from prisoners. The trope is perhaps most strongly in play during the futile fight for a bridge that Blondie and Tuco witness. Blondie, a hardened killer and con man, is disturbed at the sight of the battle, saying that he's never seen so many lives wasted so pointlessly. An unremarked mass of shallow war graves is the setting of the film's final scenes.
• The Guns of Navarone. Every win comes at a price. The line which separates right and wrong becomes very blurry in pursuit of victory. After the team escapes captivity, the Nazis torch the village of Mandrakos. Imagine what they will do to every village in Navarone now that the guns are destroyed. Finally, Butcher Brown suffers Post Traumatic Stress Disorder after his combat in the Spanish Civil War.
• The brutality of World War I and all its horrors are what drove Captain Elliot Spencer of the Hellraiser franchise to his future as Pinhead. So terrible were the things he saw, he fell into a depraved life of carnal excess. To quote the man himself:
  Spencer: We'd seen God fail you see. So many dead. For us, He too fell at Flanders.
• A Home Too Far, a Taiwanese war film duology, revolving around the exodus of a ROC platoon and their families after the Chinese Civil War, chronicling their escape from the Southern Jungles to South-East Asia as well as the various hardships (malaria, lack of food, etc.) they have to suffer in the process. Right off the start the film gives audiences a glimpse of a massive massacre scene and it gets worse from there.
• Hornets' Nest: It begins with the massacre of an entire Italian village. This really sets the tone for a gritty and very unpleasant World War II film where the ugliest aspects of the Designated Hero are on full display. Rape as Drama and Child Soldiers are heavily involved, with a heavy dose of The Revolution Will Not Be Civilized.
• How I Won the War seems very comical and satirical, but it has a particularly brutal underbelly. It's viewed and monologued by the Kilgore, however, and manages to at first glance come off as War Is Glorious, at least until you remember he got the rest of his men killed with poorly planned actions, and generally bad training. Mostly a shot at careerist military men who would do anything for a promotion or a medal, as well as being generally incompetent on all fronts, and how costly such a thing is to everyone but them. Without selling or stealing a single physical tangible thing it is still easy to classify Lieutenant Goodbody as a 'war profiteer,' as there is no doubt from the conversations he has with his German counterpart he will no doubt go on to write a best-seller about his 'heroism under fire' and being the sole survivor of his squad.
• The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Parts 1 and 2 both show mass murder on civilians, up to genocide.
• The Hurt Locker, about a bomb defusing squad during the current War On Terror. Besides the fact that the protagonist might like the tension a bit too much, clearly shows how bad things are in Iraq.
• Jarhead: Just sitting in a desert waiting for war to begin is already hell. The fact that it never does for some is absolutely soul crushing and leaves soldiers battling lingering feelings of despair, loneliness, and alienation instead of an enemy on the battlefield.
• Kuroneko: The disconnect between nobles and peasants when it comes to the hardships of war. Poor Hachi goes mad after finding out that his mother and wife were killed while he was off playing war hero.
• The Last of the Mohicans: The feeling of helplessness when your home gets attacked when you are away.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers: In the Extended Edition, Faramir recognizes how horrible war is when he sees the body of an enemy soldier that he had just killed.
  Faramir: His sense of duty was no less than yours, I deem. You wonder what his name is, where he came from, and if he was really evil at heart. What lies or threats led him on this long march from home. If he would not rather have stayed there in peace. War will make corpses of us all.
• Lord of War: Those who suffer in war are rarely those who benefit and conflict need not be just. The special horror of feeding murder and destruction for monetary gain.
• Onibaba: The deprivation of war and how low people will sink just to survive.
• Paths of Glory. Set in World War I, it shows the brutality of war, and depicts cruel, incompetent, and corrupt Armchair Generals.
  • Enemy at the Gates has a similar theme.
• The Patriot (2000): Benjamin Martin helps win the war but his home is destroyed, two of his sons are dead and the other two are forced to kill at a young age, irreversibly changing them both (one is scarred for life, the other likes it too much).
• A Peck on the Cheek: The Sri Lankan Civil War is primarily portrayed through its traumatic effects on civilians. Amudha was given up for adoption as a baby because of the war (her parents were involved with the Tamil Tigers, and her mother was trying to escape retribution from the Sri Lankan government), and 9 years later we still see multiple situations where people have to be evacuated from their villages before the shooting and bombing starts.
• A 1996 Serbian film Pretty Village Pretty Flame is set during the Bosnian war and follows a Serbian squad which is stuck in a tunnel, behind enemy lines. What follows is the good old Sanity Slippage.
• Another good example: Purgatory (Chistilishe in Russian). Is about first Chechen war. Takes violence to a whole new level.
• Rambo: The war will never end for those who fought it.
• Ran: "Hell's Picture Scroll"-scene. This was the inspiration for the D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan.
• Played straight in Red Cliff with Lady of War Sun Shangxiang being excited to go to battle and Zhuge Liang and Zhou Yu providing this trope.
  Zhuge Liang: "Princess, have you ever fought in a war?"
  Sun Shangxiang: "There's always a first time!"
  Zhou Yu: "The first time I fought, I wished there was never a second."
• Zhang Yimou's Red Sorghum shows the effect of the Second Sino-Japanese War ^note part of World War II on one man's family; focusing on the narrator's grandmother's sorghum-liquor distillery.
• Saving Private Ryan: The meat-grinder of the D-Day landings: the traumatic chaos and helplessness in the face of extreme violence (for example, a horrifically gored soldier who had the unfortunate fate of having his guts splattered from his stomach in graphic, stomach-churning detail while holding his entrails and calling for his mother before screaming in horrible agony). In fact the opening played down what a nightmare the Omaha Beach landing was by showing it being over relatively quickly. Extend that scene out to a day if you want to imagine the real thing. Also, that was after the defense was fooled in moving more than half of their forces away. Imagine how a full frontal assault would have gone down!
  • After the opening scene, the American soldiers frequently express a desire to just go home and/or end the conflict, they talk about their families and old jobs and how insane the world has become all with the devastating carnage around them. Their German counterparts, for what little we see of them, seem to be just as scared and traumatized by the ordeal as the yankees.
  • The film however makes a point that the brutality and suffering that the soldiers cheerfully endure makes them all the more heroic for it. The epilogue basically posits that the deaths of Captain Miller and his men were a Heroic Sacrifice.
• The opening scenes of The Shadow of Chikara feature Captain Cutter being ordered to lead his men into a battle that his knows is futile and is going to be bloodbath. By the end of it, everyone except Cutter and Moon are dead.
• The two movies about the battle of Stalingrad anything but hide the gruesomeness of said battle, with plenty of Body Horror and suffering in both sides.
• Star Wars:
  • Rogue One is defined by this trope through and through. Notable members of the otherwise heroic Rebel Alliance are assassins, mercenaries, and saboteurs with some factions willing to commit outright atrocities against Imperial sympathizers. Regular Red Shirt rebel soldiers are mercilessly slaughtered en-masse by Darth Vader and the Imperial War Machine. Even the main heroes aren't exempt from the horrors of war with all of them dying horribly in the climactic battle.
  • The Empire Strikes Back has Yoda comment on this in his introduction.
    Luke: I'm looking for a great warrior.
    Yoda: Ahhh! A great warrior. *laughs and shakes his head* Wars not make one great.
  • Return of the Jedi has a minor moment of this during its climactic space-battle: when the Imperial Super Star Destroyer crashes into the Death Star, while his staff cheer, Admiral Akbar just slumps sadly in his command chair. According to the actor, he was supposed to join in the celebrations but he refused, much to the chagrin of the director.
  • Revenge of the Sith also features this trope as a major theme: the Republic is in rough shape after three years of constant war, its capital planet has been attacked, and there are sieges on many other worlds. As well, the Jedi are openly questioning if their role in leading the Republic's army has compromised them morally, and the Senate is under the control of an increasingly dictatorial Palpatine who has used the war as an excuse to amass more power to himself.
  • While Solo is primarily a Space Western, it takes a few minutes to show life from the perspective of the Imperial infantry: frantically running across a mud-covered wasteland, with their fellow soldiers getting blown up left, right and centre, all to score a completely pointless "victory" against some unseen aliens whose home planet they're invading. Oh, and if you're caught trying to desert, you're Fed to the Beast.
• Tears of the Sun: Watching a nation tear itself apart and not being able to help because you are "neutral".
• The Thin Red Line: American soldiers faced with the brutality of the World War II Japanese military struggling not to commit retaliatory war crimes. Lots of Gray-and-Gray Morality, honest Tear Jerker moments and serious contemplation about whether war is an inevitable part of human civilization or not.
• Thor: Both Odin and Laufey are very familiar with war, and both want to avoid it. Thor, who knows a lot about fighting but nothing about real war, pushes Laufey too far and gets what he wanted.
  Laufey: You know not what your actions would unleash. I do. Go now while I still allow it.
• Zhang Yimou's To Live: the main characters, touring China with a traditional Chinese shadow-puppet troupe, are impressed into the Nationalist army during the Chinese Civil War. They fall asleep one night and wake up to find that a battle has taken place; the field is strewn with bodies, most of them Nationalist, and their friend's brother's body is found among the carnage. They surrender to the advancing Communists, who have them enlist when they find that their new captives can entertain them with shadow puppets.
• Twenty-Four Eyes is a Japanese film that dramatizes the misery that war brings to a little fishing village in The '30s and The '40s, centering on a teacher and her students as they age. The teacher loses her husband to the war, three of the male students are killed, another is blinded, and one of the female students contracts tuberculosis after being mobilized to work in a factory.
• Vera Drake: We never see it ourselves, but just from the little we hear of war from Stanley, Reg, and Sid, it's obvious that it's taken its toll, particularly on Sid.
• In A Very Long Engagement a young, cheerful man is conscripted from his simple and happy country life to fight in World War I. After seeing too much misery he decides to self-mutilate in an attempt to get sent home, but his superior won't allow it, and his superior tears up the pardon. So he's sent in the no-man's area between the two warring factions, gets shot up and ends up so traumatized he loses his memory. The whole film is interspersed with brutally realistic scenes intended to depict the hell of war even more powerfully.
• The Victors is an example that was unusual for its time.
• Almost anything set in The Vietnam War.
  • Full Metal Jacket: most famous for depiction of dehumanising military training which turns young men into callous killers at best and that's when it doesn't completely shatter them mentally. The actual war itself is portrayed as unglamorously and unheroically as possible with Marines alternating between long periods of crushing boredom and tense combat moments which remind them of the wide gulf between what they've been told about war and the reality. They don't even get a glorious, heroic death, being picked off by a teenage girl.
  • Platoon. Set in Vietnam, this movie does not attempt balance: it is an all-out War Is Hell work. It contains war crimes including murder and attempted rape, graphic imagery of violent death and maiming, PTSD, drug use, mistaken fire on friendly units, and focuses on lethal infighting. ^note For the record, the drug use was generally one of the more positive elements the protagonist encountered.
  • Apocalypse Now for the use of War Is Hell surrealism as the engine that transforms Willard and sets up the final confrontation and the Heart of Darkness revelation. Kurtz whispering "The horror ... the horror..." while dying is now a classic image of anti-war cinema. Interestingly enough Apocalypse Now also turns up in War Is Glorious.
  • The Deer Hunter. Hellish experience while in Vietnam. Shell shock when returning. And then gets even worse for the attempted rescue of one who got left behind. Given to their experiences in war, even work at Steel Mill feels a leisurely activity.
  • Hamburger Hill
  • The Boys in Company C focuses on the psychological side of Vietnam and suffering of poor leadership.
  • We Were Soldiers, after Lt. Herrick's platoon spends a full day and night trapped behind enemy lines fighting for their lives, the survivors, lead by Sergeant Savage, are finally rescued and reunited with their battalion. A dirt-and-blood covered Sergeant Savage meets with Sergeant Major Plumley:
  Sergeant Major Plumley: That's a nice day, Sergeant Savage.
  • Even Operation: Dumbo Drop has this as it portrays the hypocrisy of the US Army's "Hearts and Minds" campaign (they try to win civilian support only when it suits them) and how the average civilian doesn't really care who wins the war.
• Played straight in War Horse, with the war being hell for horses and men alike.
• Westfront 1918: The even bleaker German counterpart to Hollywood's take on All Quiet on the Western Front. The film carried an obvious pacifist message, never leaving room for any glorification or positivity of war whatsoever and never glossing over its horrible consequences on men, both physically and mentally. Soldiers being buried alive by shellings, shell-shocked men, amputees... You name it.
• When Trumpets Fade, about the battle of Hürtgen Forest in the autumn of 1944 — a senseless hell of fog, snow, land mines and shrapnel in which suicidal missions are the only way to break the deadlock.
• In the Finnish film Winter War from 1989 the eponymous conflict is depicted as a grueling struggle for survival against seemingly inexhaustible Soviet hordes backed by abundant artillery and aerial firepower. Most of the main characters do not make it to the end of the film, while the Red Army soldiers don't fare much better as they are mowed down like grass with each attack against the Finnish lines.
• Wonder Woman (2017): The war is depicted as bleak and horrible, with the main character being unable to comprehend why humans would waste so many lives in such a pointless way without it being caused by an external supernatural force of evil and her companions all being scarred, broken and beat down by the war.
• Yamato shows several times in gory detail people getting shot or blown up.
• Youth (2017): The characters end up involved in the Sino-Vietnamese war. Soldiers are seen with horrific injuries, one having burns all over his body. Xiaoping ends up traumatized, and Liu Feng an amputee.
• Zulu. "Do you think I could stand this butcher's yard more than once?"
  • The film does, however, adhere to the 60s trope of bloodless wounds — including bayonettings. The actual Zulu practice of disemboweling the dead, much referred to in accounts of the Isandlwana battlefield is also not referred to; the British troops found this quite revolting but it was described by the Zulu as a religious rite, allowing the soul of the dead man to escape and not haunt his killer. YMMV on the accuracy of this.

---