Complete Guide to Streaming War Movies
Sadly, the human race has pretty much never not been at war. We’re a violent, combative crew. Hopefully one day that will change and we’ll enter an era of unprecedented peace.
Until then, we have the movies. War may be hell, but war movies are pretty great! Armed combat and all the other various theaters and forms of war makes for high-octane drama. And that’s pretty much exactly what we are looking for out of our drama films.
What follows is a (mostly comprehensive) list of all the war movies available with a streaming subscription on the major streaming services. If you’re interested in paying per movie, options like Amazon, Google Play and YouTube should help. But the movies here are all free with a log-in to Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, or HBO Now/HBO Go.
Before we get started, let’s quickly ackowledge the excellent war television series available on these services.
Turn: Washington’s Spies (Netflix), Band of Brothers (Amazon and HBO), The Pacific (Amazon and HBO), and Generation Kill (Amazon and HBO) are all excellent options for those willing to commit a little more time. Now, let’s get to the movies!
Allied
At first glance, romance and war don’t seem like natural companions. At the same time, however, both the romance genre and war films deal primarily with heightened human experiences and emotions. Allied is one such film that combines them decently.
Allied stars Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard as a Canadian Intelligence officer and a French resistance fighter who fall in love while posing as a married couple. Pitt and Cotillard are excellent actors with even better chemistry. It also helps that the film takes place in a little African town that movie fans might be familiar with: Casablanca.
The Civil War: A Ken Burns Film
Creating the definitive Civil War documentary is only slightly less insane and difficult for making the definitive documentary for all of planet Earth. That’s the business that documentarian Ken Burns is in, however, making incredibly, completely definitive documentaries on big, American subjects.
The Civil War is a nine-episode series that ran on PBS in 1990 and the scope of it is absolutely breathtaking. Still, it’s ability to turn long-dead soldiers from a different era into living, breathing human beings through only their letters is why Burns is considered one of our finest documentarians.
Darkest Hour
Most war films understandably take in the action from the perspective of those on the front lines. Darkest Hour is the rare war film that wants to examine the cost of war from the leadership perspective.
Gary Oldman stars as Winston Churchill in the role that finally won him an Oscar….and put him under seemingly 300 pounds of prosthetics. Darkest Hour is much more than a simple Churchill biography, the movie instead takes a look at the early days of World War II when it seemed frighteningly possible that the United Kingdom would fall to the menace in central Europe.
The Hunt for Red October
While the Cold War between United States and Russia was notorious for being…well, cold, in the works of fiction, it might as well have been World War III. The Hunt for Red October is an espionage submarine thriller (admittedly one of the very few in the genre) based on a story from Tom Clancy.
Alec Baldwin stars as our old friend Jack Ryan, a CIA intelligence analyst and apparent naval history expert. Ryan discovers that one of the Soviets’ submarines, Red October, has gone rogue under the command of Captain 1st Rank Marko Aleksandrovich Ramius (Sean Connery) and may actually deploy an unauthorized nuclear strike. The Russians and Americans must find Red October and prevent nuclear holocaust.
Watch The Hunt for Red October for fun submarine shenanigans and Sean Connery’s stubborn Scottish accent.
The Thin Red Line
The Thin Red Line is huge. Just huge.
It’s based on a huge concept – The Battle of Mount Austen in the Pacific Theater of World War II. The title comes from an epic Rudyard Kipling poem in his Barrack-Room Ballads. And the cast is positively enormous in terms of size and star power. Sean Penn, Adrian Brody, Jim Caviezel, Nick Nolte, George Clooney, John Cusack, Woody Harrelson, and John C. Reilly all star as American soldiers attempting to secure a small portion of an island in the Pacific.
The Thin Red Line, as directed by Terrence Mallick, captures the terrors and unexpected occasional beauty of war perfectly.
And here’s the complete list, just in case you don’t like our choices!
300
Netflix
Allied
Atonement
Beasts of No Nation
Centurion
The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns
Cold Mountain
Darkest Hour
Defiance
Downfall
Netflix
Enemy at the Gates
The First World War
Five Came Back
The Hunt for Red October
Hyena Road
A Ken Burns Film: The War
The Kingdom
Netflix
The Last Face
The Longest Day
Lord of War
The Messenger
Operatino Dumbo Drop
Rescue Dawn
Sandcastle
Schindler’s List
The Siege of Jadotville
Strategic Air Command
Stripes
The Thin Red Line
Troy
Netflix
Valkyrie
The Wall
A War
War Machine
World War II in Colour
When Trumpets Fade
Windtalkers
The Yellow Birds