5 War Movies That Paved the Way for ‘Civil War’

Director Alex Garland and cinematographer Rob Hardy have worked together to make worlds that all feel like they could beat you up, whether they’re vast and weird (“Annihilation“), contained and sharp (“Ex Machina“), or geometric and severe (“Devs”). The pair’s collaborations have a consideration of space and power with an almost magnetic pull. The firepower of their latest film, “Civil War,” is quite literal. The camera’s job is to watch the journalist characters embedded in a military assault on Washington, D.C., witness the Lincoln Monument get blown up.

In this, “Civil War” joins a robust tradition of war films stretching back as far as 1925’s “The Big Parade” and 1926’s “What Price Glory?” that try to convey the power of violence itself: its horror, its allure, its twisted humor, and most of all its undeniable pull towards more violence. Hardy told IndieWire that he was much more influenced by photographers William Eggleston and Saul Leiter than specific war films or war photographers — although he did look at the work of Jessie’s (Cailee Spaeny) hero Lee Miller and others.

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“For me, it was about sort of finding that singular moment — you look for the emotion, you want to be close enough to capture that in a subject, but also you want to be wide enough to feel the space and everything that’s going on around them. And typically, that works as a mid-shot with some headroom for me personally. So strangely [the style is] closer to the way someone like Kubrick might frame something than it is like a war photographer,” Hardy said.

Stanley Kubrick certainly knew a thing or two about war films. But if you can see some of his DNA in the style of “Civil War,” that got us thinking about what other combat films it shares a visual language with. Here are five war films (and one video game) that all share something — be it a sensibility, specific techniques, or a philosophical approach — with how “Civil War” tackles its action and combat sequences. They show just how successful war films can be at evoking strong feelings about violence, suffering, power, and courage, and also just how hard it is to tell war stories in a way that helps us avert them.

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