I know I have a soft spot for military/military related movies being a veteran and coming from a military family so I may be biased but if y’all don’t mind an older movie check out The Best Years of our Lives. It came out in 1946 and is about 3 guys from the same town returning home after WW2 and picking up where they left off.
It may sound like a boring premise but I promise it’s an excellent movie. I know it’s currently available on Pluto TV.
Thanks, I'll look into this.
A lot of current audiences can't deal with older movies because they lack the technical polish or spectacular action that everyone expects from modern movies. Or, God forbid, they may be filmed in black and white.
But if you can deal with these limitations and let yourself get into the mindset, you may find some great stories with compelling characters that are far better than the vapid spectacles that most modern movies are.
I'll recommend:
Sands of Iwo Jima — John Wayne has to be a total hardass to prepare his Marines for the invasion of Iwo Jima.
Run Silent Run Deep — Clark Gable is a submarine captain so intent on destroying the Japanese ship that sank his last command, his crew starts to question his competence.
Both are great movies from a time when Hollywood wasn't dominated by people who hate America.
The sad truth is that most people now cannot adapt to old black-and-white filmography no matter the topic or grandeur. People now just will not tolerate reruns of old B&W movies - they're too drab, too slow, too tedious to unfold.
Outside of the exotic film noir genre, there is no current audience for B&W movies.
Many of my favorite movies are in black-and-white. What I dislike is modern movies that are in black-and-white, just because. I think these movies are almost always worse because of it, and that it's a crappy decision for a director to make.
Sands of Iwo Jima is good and they get the original flag raisers to recreate the flag raising. I need to see Run Silent, Run Deep
“Run Silent” is a very good movie indeed.
Another movie I’d strongly recommend is “12 O’Clock High”. Which is sort of about the bombing campaign over Germany, but is really about leadership: what it means to be a leader, and the cost of being one.
Not to mention that Sands of Iwo Jima has some actual real combat footage in it. The tank scenes, the flamethrowers, all were for real
You could only get away with this in the days of black and white (splicing together real footage and studio shots), but even in black and white you can easily tell what shots are archive.