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Fret not, because despite these restrictions, we are left with a healthy diet to choose from. You can always start with dishonorable mentions: Pearl Harbor and Baz Luhrmann’s Australia come to mind as recent World War II Oscar bait movies that went nowhere (will Unbroken join their unwanted fate?).

The honorable mentions, however, are long and plentiful. Clint Eastwood’s best work is arguably the Flags of Our Fathers/Letters from Iwo Jima one-two combo from 2006. The two movies explore in a realistic and fair manner how national identity affected not just the two nations warring in the Pacific, but the day-to-day fights of the soldiers dueling in that theater. In Flags, the Iwo Jima picture is seen for what it rightly was: an important piece of war propaganda. But there’s nothing dishonorable in that. And at the same time the overwhelming sense of loss that overwhelmed the characters unable to care about propaganda is conveyed respectfully and realistically. At the same time, the Iwo Jima battle and the picture taking itself is subtly explored in Letters, where Eastwood taps brilliantly into the honor-driven war valor of the Japanese. The two movies are brilliant.

I’m also partial to Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun, starring an almost toddler Christian Bale living in China in the days before the last Americans were evacuated after the Japanese invasion. This movie was an epic Spielberg style- spanning years and costing millions. Many did not like it, but I was impressed with how the profound length of the movie makes one fall for the characters to the point of really feeling their sense of loss in the face of the tragedy of war.

Other more modern movies deserve mention. Saving Private Ryan could arguably be in the top five. The opening scene, depicting the Allied disembarkment in Normandy, is arguably one of the best war sequences ever filmed. Brutal, shocking, and impeccably filmed, it rightly won Steven Spielberg his second Best Director Oscar for a war-related movie. Yet I left it off the list because I find the backdrop story simply too romanticized - too easy of a set-up, climax, anti-climax, and denouement to be in the top five. The movie is respectful to war veterans and pulls at the heart strings in ways only Spielberg knows how. But many of the performances, particularly Matt Damon’s, are so disconnected with how I perceived soldiers in that war would act that at times the movie seems almost fantastic.

So too must I discard The Thin Red Line. Many people (certainly movie experts) will say that Terrence Malick’s star-studded melodrama about the war is one of the best, if not the best WWII movies of all time. I respect and admire it greatly, like I do Saving Private Ryan, but the style is simply not my thing. In fact, despite most people’s view that the movie is artistically brilliant, I view it as more show than substance. I respect the brutally honest portrayals of the horrors of war, but I do not find it emotionally compelling because of its disjointed narrative.

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