The 10 Best World War I Movies Ever Made
Travel into the trenches and across No Man's Land to tackle which movies captured the harrowing battlefield the best.
Everything I learned about World War I comes from a Terry Deary Horrible Histories book and then a lot of movies. The thing is, the First World War doesn't really enter the cultural consciousness the way the Second does.
Generally, people might know about Franz Ferdinand (not the band) and trenches, and that's about it.
But World War I changed modern warfare and politics around the globe.
And in watching the movies, we see the tragedy and violence that shaped those changes firsthand.
For filmmakers, the Great War presents a unique visual and narrative challenge, introducing people to aspects of a conflict that ended in a stalemate and that took so many souls with it.
Let's dive in.
10. Gallipoli (1981)
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- Director: Peter Weir
Peter Weir's Australian masterpiece starring a very young Mel Gibson focuses on two sprinters who join the Light Horse regiment and head to Egypt in order to fight.
We spend a ton of time watching the men train and become friends and race each other before we see any action. In fact, we're so attached to them that when they enter battle, and we see the likely outcome is death, we're then glued to our seats in pain once they hit the meat grinder of the Dardanelles.
The final sequence, where they race from trench to trench among machine gun fire, is an all-timer.
9. The Big Parade (1925)
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- Director: King Vidor
Key Takeaway: Establishing the visual grammar of war.
Before talkies, The Big Parade set the bar for war epics. It's a silent movie you can watch in full on YouTube. It came out just a few years after the war ended and has this epic scale and scope that you can only get without CGI.
Director King Vidor captured the psychological decay of soldiers with groundbreaking camera movement and deep-focus staging in No Man's Land.
It was a movie very ahead of its time.
8. They Shall Not Grow Old (2018)
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- Director: Peter Jackson
I actually think this is one of the most important movies ever made, and one of the best docs. Peter Jackson took original Imperial War Museum archival footage, restored it, hand-colorized it, adjusted frame rates to modern 24fps, and added forensic lip-read audio so that we get actual wondrous footage from WWI.
You watch real soldiers and real battles and real conditions and hear about it through these men's voices and opinions. It brings such humanity to the conflict, and you sort of feel like you're talking to their ghosts.
7. Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
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- Director: David Lean
Okay, this could be number one on any list. But I am concentrating solely on the First World War. And since this covers a conflict that is important to it, but also tangential, I put it a little lower here.
David Lean’s desert epic tackles the Middle Eastern theater and a man named Lawrence who was able to cross the desert and conquer enemy forces through sheer will.
This is one movie I implore people to try to see on the big screen and in 70mm if possible in their lifetime. It's staggering, like going to the Sistine Chapel.
The legendary "match cut" from a dying flame to a desert sunrise remains one of the greatest transitions in history.
6. A Very Long Engagement (2004)
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- Director: Jean-Pierre Jeunet
This was a world war, so the whole world has different points of view on what happened and who fought in it. This French Film has a style that gives a surreal quality to the war.
In it, Audrey Tautou plays a woman searching for her fiancé, who was sentenced to walk into No Man's Land as punishment for self-mutilation.
Jeunet uses sepia-toned romantic flashbacks juxtaposed with desaturated combat sequences to visually separate hope from trauma.
It's a hidden gem of a movie.
5. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
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Director: Lewis Milestone
The remake in the 2020s was very good, but I want to put the original on here because it is the first film to win Academy Awards for both Best Picture and Best Director.
We follow the German perspective, and we're stuck in these visceral, deadly moments that feel shocking even now.
In order to shoot this movie, they mounted heavy cameras on crane tracks running parallel to the trenches to create long, fluid tracking shots of charging infantry. And guess what? We still do that today.
4. All Quiet on the Western Front (2022)
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- Director: Edward Berger
Fake out! Of course, the remake had to be on here; it was so wonderful and brutal and visceral.
Berger’s German-language adaptation brings modern realism to the same story and expands on the themes with history's advantage of time and prescience.
The opening montage shows us a dead soldier's uniform as it gets washed, repaired, and reissued to a naive young recruit. It's chilling and sets the tone for everything that follows.
This is a bureaucratic war where there are no winners.
3. Grand Illusion (La Grande Illusion, 1937)
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- Director: Jean Renoir
Renoir’s POW drama is about the death of 19th-century aristocratic ideals through the violence of war. We're given insight into the German prisoner camps, where French officers and their captors discover they share more in common by class than by national borders.
There's a dark humor here, as each does not want to be around the poor soldiers, and we deconstruct where society is really split.
2. 1917 (2019)
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- Director: Sam Mendes
Cinematographer Roger Deakins and editor Lee Smith stitched together long takes to make Mendes’ story of two young soldiers who are racing to deliver a message to save lives feel totally critical. Every choice they make has you on the edge of your seat.
Everything they witness, you witness too.
It's a masterpiece.
1. Paths of Glory (1957)
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- Director: Stanley Kubrick
We follow Kirk Douglas as a French officer defending three soldiers selected at random to face execution for "cowardice" after a failed suicide mission ordered by glory-hungry generals.
These men don't deserve it, and everyone knows it, but that's the price of war.
You have these long, iconic tracking shots that reverse-lead Colonel Dax through the trenches, using low angles and movement to lock the viewer directly into the claustrophobic dread of the men on the front lines, awaiting their deaths.
Summing It All Up
The First World War was a harrowing experience for anyone who lived through it. We saw massive body counts across the globe, and tragedy felt like it struck at every turn.
These movies do a great job of bringing us into the fray and showing not only the cost of war but also the small triumphs.
Which are your favorites? Did I leave any off the list?
Let me know what you think in the comments.
