In today’s fast-paced world, maintaining a sense of equilibrium often involves seeking entertainment. While preferences for enjoyment differ among individuals, growing up in the era of Netflix and other streaming services has led many of us to gravitate toward highly rated and captivating shows and movies. These platforms offer a diverse array of genres, spanning war, comedy, romance, true stories, and more.
War has been a dominant factor in human history since the dawn of time. It fascinates and frightens everyone. It is full of stories of heroism, courage, and determination, as well as absolute cruelty and carnage. It is the greatest danger a man can go through, leaving behind everything else but his humanity and struggle for existence.
OTT is full of war movies that aim to both inspire and educate. Military Movies can seem like the peak of human goodness, where people come together to fight against unjust rules and for a better tomorrow. But others – the best war movies – can expose the atrocities of war and show the true cruelty that people can do to each other. One such OTT platform that entertains us with the best war movies is Netflix.
Here are the 5 Most Underrated War Movies on Netflix
1. All quiet on the western front
All Quiet on the Western Front is the third film adaptation of the 1929 novel of the same name. It’s also remarked as the best of the three, and its screenplay can be used to prove it. This near-masterpiece was a titan of the awards season. It feels like it’s breaking and changing the reality of war during the First World War, and it’s doing it in a way that feels somehow new and fresh, even though it’s not the first to do it. Director Edward Berger focuses on the background of WWI while maintaining the heart of the story about the brutal experiences of German soldiers in the trenches.
2. Dunkirk
Christopher Nolan, one of the most renowned directors in Hollywood, made this epic. The story is about the 1940 Miracle at Dunkirk, where British Navy boats and civilian mariners on their watercraft rescued 338,000 soldiers of the British Expeditionary Force and a large number of Allied troops from France. Tommy is a young soldier and the only survivor of a violent German ambush. Despite being traumatized by the carnage he witnessed as a young man, Tommy does his best to help the wounded and get his companions to safety.
3. The Forgotten Battle
It is a Dutch war drama based on the historical battle of Scheldt in 1944. The movie displayed that war did not only reshape our world but became a bundle of stories for the generations to come. Stories of courage, grief, brotherhood, and untapped human emotions. The Forgotten Battle is ultimately about the futility of war and the horrors of civilians who must decide what role they will play living under an evil regime. Everyone had to make a moral choice: cooperate, turn a blind eye, or resist. The film contains narratives that show the situation perfectly.
4. Darkest Hour
Gary Oldman won the Best Actor Oscar for his portrayal of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill in the drama about the early days of World War II. Churchill faced a lot of backlash from his cabinet and the opposition when he refused to sign a peace treaty with Adolf Hitler, and the film dramatizes the crisis effectively. His administration survived a crushing defeat on the battlefields of France in 1939 and won over the nation by evacuating soldiers from the beaches of Dunkirk. “Darkest Hour” ends with the Prime Minister’s legendary “We fight on the shore” speech in front of Parliament.
5. How to Become a Tyrant
In the masterpiece, dictators use a fairly consistent playbook to rise to power and hold it for decades. Using examples from real dictators like Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein, Kim Jong-Il, and others, this fascinating documentary series describes every step of the playbook, telling the stories of how they rose to authoritarian power. “How to Be a Tyrant” uses commentary from professors, officials, and journalists who covered these stories. It illustrates them using lively retellings of the most terrible stories of the tyrants, all told by actor Peter Dinklage.
