So how fitting that at the first Academy Awards ever, World War I epic Wings (1927) would win Best Picture, partially on the strength of its inventive camerawork that swept audiences into the love triangle and aerial dogfights. Movies became how we process trauma, looking back on the things we have experienced with honor, anger, regret, and romance.
This new medium, with its filmmakers just beginning to create feature-length stories, found its power in resurrecting recent history on-screen to transportive life. There would be books and there would be songs written about the War – now it was time to see what movies were capable of expressing. World War 1 (1914-1918) was humanity’s first shared cataclysm that the movies had been around for. Not only did the First World War plunge our planet in death, plague, and turmoil, it would become a sort of stress test for filmmaking, which was still in its early years. With that, we’ve collected and ranked every World War I movie by Tomatometer. The Sam Mendes film arrives in a moment of peak WWI interest, seen from 15-million seller video game Battlefield 1 and Peter Jackson’s incomparably vivid They Shall Not Grow Old documentary. The 2020 Golden Globes pick for Best Motion Picture – Drama: 1917, a dramatic thriller presented as a single continuous shot, and a tale of valor and sacrifice during World War I. (Photo by Touchstone) All World War I Movies Ranked By Tomatometer