World War II was exactly as it was billed, fought all over the world. World War II movies, of which there are many, are set in all the world as well. Across Europe, Africa, and Asia, if there was fighting, there is probably a movie about it. Here is a list of some of those many movies — some of which are among the best war movies of all time — and where they took place.
For a movie that seems to be sinking everywhere, Saving Private Ryan takes place in a condensed area. Captain John Miller (Tom Hanks) and his men landed on Omaha Beach in Normandy on D-Day and met Private Ryan (Matt Damon) in the fictional town of Remelle, also in Normandy, so all the action in the film takes place in a small region of northwestern France.
One of the most important World War II films of all time, The Great Escape is primarily set in a prisoner-of-war camp in German-occupied Poland. After their escape, the infantrymen scattered across Europe, adding Switzerland, Germany, and beyond. The film is, however, a highly fictional narrative and never actually specifies where exactly the camp is.
Terence Malik’s The Thin Red Line is a very different kind of war movie, as you’d expect from the director. The action in the movie takes place on Guadalcanal in the Solomon Islands. Much of the movie was shot on location in the Solomons, including some near the actual sites of the battle, highlighting just how beautiful the islands are and how brutal the battle was.
The German film Das Boot is hailed as one of the most productive World War II films of all time. Of course, most of the film was shot in a very narrow and realistic underwater environment, however, the titular German submarine was patrolling the North Atlantic in the film.
Considered a vintage of the war film genre, The Bridge on the River Kwai is an amazing film. It tells a fictional story of British war criminals in a Japanese criminal camp tasked with building a bridge over the Khwae Yai River in Thailand for Burma. Although set in Thailand, the film was shot in Sri Lanka.
While Flags of Our Fathers and his other major piece, Letters From Iwo Jima, are set on the island of Iwo Jima, both were filmed primarily in California (and, interestingly, Iceland). The films tell the story of the Iwo Jima war in either city. American look and Japanese look.
The Fall has one of the most memorable videos of all time, in which other people use Hitler’s downfall for thousands of other things that disappointed them. It’s also an incredibly gritty film depicting the last days of the Third Reich, set in and around the United Kingdom. The Führer’s famous bunker in Berlin as Allied forces close in on the capital.
The attack on Pearl Harbor in December 1941 has been the subject of many movies. Michael Bay’s 2001 film Pearl Harbor is set in many locations, but the most common is the Pearl Harbor naval base on the island of Oahu. Hawaii wasn’t a state in 1941, that wouldn’t take place for another 18 years.
Another movie where the location is revealed right in the title is Dunkirk. Director Christopher Nolan’s masterpiece was filmed at the actual beach in northern France, in the town of Dunkirk, near the Belgian border, where the evacuation happened in 1940. There are pluses and minuses to this approach, as the town and the beach look very different today than they would have in 1940, still, it’s really cool to see a movie filmed where the events took place.
Patton tells the story of the legendary General George S. Patton (George C. Scott) and follows his trail through North Africa and Europe during World War II. It begins with Patton in Tunisia and then Sicily. It also describes Patton’s advance through northern Europe. during the decisive Battle of the Bulge, where he “saved” the 101st Airborne, although, as Band of Brothers has taught us, the 101st did not need to be saved.
One of the most impressive casts of all time was assembled for A Bridge Too Far. James Caan, Robert Redford, Sean Connery, Gene Hackman, Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, and Ryan O’Neill are just a few of the big names in the film. The film tells the story of the disastrous Operation Market Garden in the Netherlands, which aimed to “end the war until Christmas”, but failed miserably.
Empire of the Sun rarely makes many lists of Steven Spielberg’s most productive films, but it should be. The story is set in China, which is unique, and stars a very young Christian Bale as a snobbish student at an English preparatory school who is forced to adapt to the harsh life in a Japanese internment camp near the Chinese city of Suzhou.
Most of the action in Fury 2016 takes place in the cramped spaces of a Sherman tank. With a fantastic cast including Brad Pitt and Jon Bernthal, this tank team fights the Germans in the countryside and small towns of Germany in the final days of the war.
The Imitation Game is a war movie with no battles and no violence. Still, it tells one of the most important stories of World War II. In the movie, Alan Turing (Benedict Cumberbatch, in maybe his best role) and the other codebreakers race to unlock the secrets of the Enigma Machine and the German codes. The movie takes place in an English country manor called Bletchley Park, near Milton Keynes, northwest of London.
Escape To Victory or simply Victory does something that very few films do: it combines the war film genre with sports. In the film, Allied prisoners of war in a German camp face off against the Germans in a football match. It stars Sylvester Stallone as the goalkeeper and the wonderful Pelé as the allied players. The meeting takes place in Paris before the prisoners escape.
In Hacksaw Ridge Andrew Garfield portrays conscientious objector Desmond Doss in the Battle of Okinawa. Based on a true story, the movie is a heartwrenching look at the battle for which Doss won the Medal of Honor as a medic on the island of Okinawa during the final days of the war in the Pacific.
Angelina Jolie’s Unbroken is a combination bag. Sometimes it’s great, but also disappointing. This is the story of American pilot Louis Zamperini, who survived 47 days at sea after his plane crashed in the Pacific. When he was rescued by the Japanese military, he was first imprisoned on Kwajalein Atoll in the Marshall Islands and then on the Japanese mainland.
There is no harder story movie than Steven Spielberg’s masterpiece, Schindler’s List. The film takes an unvarnished look at the atrocities of the Holocaust through the story of Oskar Schindler (Liam Neeson). It takes place basically in Poland and what is now the Czech Republic. , two parts of Germany after the war were invaded by the Nazis.
The Battle of Midway has been recounted in a few videos over the years. The latest, Midway, directed by Roland Emmerich, tells the same story as the others. The epic naval war near Midway Atoll in the Pacific Ocean was a decisive victory for the United States in the war and absolutely reversed the trend. Today, Midway Atoll remains a U. S. territory.
The Battle of Stalingrad was one of the bloodiest of the war, if not of any war in history. The Soviets resisted the advancing German army for about six months in a horrific war of attrition. Enemy at the Gates depicts the brutality and desperation of the war that took place at Stalingrad, present-day Volgograd, in southern Russia.
Several decades after its release in World War II in 1942, Casablanca remains one of the most beloved Hollywood films of all time, influencing cinema to this day. Humphrey Bogart plays Rick Blaine, a nightclub owner who lives off the war in Casablanca, Morocco.
Saipan, in the Northern Mariana Islands, is the scene of most Windtalkers. The film tells the little-known story of the Navajo Indians who served in the war as communications experts, employing their local language to encode orders and plans on the radio. The most productive film, but it tells an important story.
The Pianist is the story of the Holocaust told through the eyes of one man, the Jewish musician Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody). It is a brutal and truthful account of his fighting in the war in hiding after the German invasion of Poland. During the war in other hideouts around Warsaw, Szpilman eventually died, but many of those who helped him were not so lucky.
The Dirty Dozen is an outdated adventure through France. It’s the kind of war movie rarely made these days, filled with the biggest stars of the era and without much at stake. Still, it’s a true classic.
The first film to tell the complete story of Pearl Harbor was the classic Torah!Tora! Torah!. Obviously, as the story suggests, most of it takes place on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, at the Pearl Harbor Naval Base.
One of many war films to win Best Picture, The English Patient is a war film and a love story. Hungarian aristocrat László Almásy (Ralph Fiennes) tells his Italian nurse (Juliette Binoche) the story of his loss in the desert while she recovers from her injuries. While the story is told from a bed in Italy, much of the story it tells takes place in North Africa, particularly Tunisia.
The opening scene in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds is intense. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz) interrogating the LaPadites at the French farm is one of the most enduring scenes ever filmed. Of course, large parts of the alternate history movie take place in Berlin (the famous final scene) and elsewhere around Europe.
In The Guns Of Navarone, an organization of foot soldiers led by Gregory Peck, David Niven and Anthony Quinn, climb a cliff to a German weapons facility on the fictional Aegean island of Navarone, between Greece and Turkey. Videos from the early ’60s about World War II that are as much an adventure movie as they are a sober look at war.
Valkyrie’s action begins in Tunisia when Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise) is wounded at the beginning of the war. Later, von Stauffenberg attempted to assassinate Hitler at Wolf’s Lair, Hitler’s secret hideout in the woods of German-occupied Poland. The rest of the film is set in Berlin and Germany while the plan is being worked out.
Before Saving Private Ryan set the standard for D-Day depictions, The Longest Day stood alone in it’s glorious telling of the story. With an all-star cast with seemingly every big star of the day, the movie was a huge hit and became a template upon which many war movies were built in later years. Of course, it takes place on the beaches of Normandy and in nearby towns like Sainte-Mère-Église.
In a classic example of a movie not living up to the true story it’s trying to tell, USS Indianapolis: Men of Courage is just not that good. It’s too bad, too, because the story of the USS Indianapolis, from transporting the bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima to its sinking and the shark attacks that followed is incredible. Instead of watching the movie, mostly set in the middle of the Philippine Sea, just watch Quint’s famous speech in Jaws.
Is it fair to call The Final Countdown a World War II movie?It does the weirdest thing: it combines a World War II story with science fiction, sending a fashionable aircraft carrier (by 1980s standards) through a porthole in time to 1941 with a chance to repel the attack on Pearl Harbor. It sounds like a movie about World War II when Japanese planes are shot down over the Pacific, which means it counts.
One of the things about videos is seeing exotic places and nothing frames those places better than a war movie.
Hugh Scott is the distribution editor of CinemaBlend. Prior to CinemaBlend, he was editor-in-chief of Suggest. com and Gossipcop. com, covering celebrity news and debunking false gossip. He has worked in the publishing industry for about two decades. covering pop culture (movies and TV shows in particular) with a willful interest and love for Gen X culture, its older influences, and what it has fostered ever since. He graduated from Boston University with a bachelor’s degree in political science, but cured himself of the preference for a politician almost without delay after graduating.
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