World War I Is Having a Pop Culture Resurgence

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Throw a stone and you’re bound to hit a movie set in the era of World War II. The history of cinema made in World War II even dates back to the global conflict itself, as books like Five Came Back have explored how directors like John Huston and William Wyler were in the trenches of World War II capturing the war as it unfolded. By contrast, World War I has been far more absent in mainstream cinema, though that’s begun to get corrected since 2010. Titles like War Horse, All Quiet on the Western Front, Wonder Woman, and 1917, among many others, have all begun to fill in the gaps in cinematic depictions of World War I.

Why has it taken so long for this particular global conflict to come to the forefront of cinematic storytelling, though? Why have World War II and the Vietnam War been so often chronicled in movies, but World War I has been left on the sidelines?

Early American War Movies Focused on WWI

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While motion pictures made from 2010 onward have certainly been more active in depicting World War I, by no means was the global conflict absent from the cinematic landscape prior to this recent decade. In fact, for the first few decades of major American cinema, if you wanted to make a war movie it had to be World War I. Early winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture like Wings and All Quiet on the Western Front wrung expansive and groundbreaking cinema from this conflict. The seminal French feature Grand Illusion, meanwhile, was also set during World War I and reinforced global cinema’s interest in exploring this conflict through filmmaking means.

After World War II drew to a close, World War I’s presence in cinema began to whittle down considerably. By this point, World War II movies were everywhere, with the amount of World War II motion pictures released in 1953 dwarfing the entire collection of World War I movies produced during the entire 1950s. That’s not to say the mid-20th century was devoid of motion pictures set during what was once known as The Great War. Stanley Kubrick’s Paths of Glory, for instance, used World War I as a tableau that could reinforce how often war boils down to the bourgeoise sending the little guy out to perish. The wounds of World War I were still vivid decades later and cinema was a way to cope with them.

The David Lean epic Lawrence of Arabia would make great use of World War I in the 1960s, but it was one of only a handful of features in that decade to take notice of World War I. As early as 1946, titles like The Best Years of Our Lives were garnering awards and audience acclaim for making movies that dealt directly with either the events of World War II or its immediate aftermath. By the time Arabia rolled into theaters, World War I was rarely depicted on-screen for a variety of reasons.

Why We Have So Few Movies About World War I

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American cinema's ambivalence towards World War I cinema, especially after World War II, can largely be chalked up to how America wasn't initially a big player in World War I. While this global conflict began in 1914, it would take until the summer of 1917 before the U.S. would have troops on the ground in Europe. The war would end in November 1918, just 17 months after the U.S. first joined the conflict. With 50,000 U.S. soldiers perishing in World War I, it's inaccurate to America didn't lose anything in the conflict. But it wasn’t as much our war as it was for a variety of European countries. That’s why many 2010s films covering World War I, such as 1917, War Horse, and even technically Wonder Woman (which never travels to American soil) are set in Europe.

There's also the darkness of World War I, which may sound redundant since all wars are bleak. But as noted by Paul D. Miller of the Atlantic Council, there was something extra brutal about World War I, "The Great War was mostly a war among rival empires for conquest and glory,” Miller explained. “A war between powers unable to reconcile their fears, interests, and honor...There were no higher ideals to fight for or for later generations to admire…How can we celebrate the end of the Great War when the war’s end was little more than a segue from one big problem to a thousand smaller ones?" These grim realities of World War I make it perfect fodder for grim movies contemplating the dark sides of humanity like All Quiet on the Western Front or Paths of Glory, but not so much if you want to make a crowd pleaser slice of big-screen entertainment.

By contrast, World War II had definitive villains (“Nazi’s…I hate these guys!”) for movies in a wide range of genres to contend with while the horrors of Pearl Harbor gave Americans more of a concrete personal investment in this global conflict. Even the landscapes of World War II, which stretched across a variety of terrains as the Nazis grew their horrifying power across new territories, were more visually appealing to filmmakers than the often drab and indistinguishable muddy terrain of World War I battlefields. Again, those backdrops are perfect for darker dramas, but less ideal for the kind of general entertainment Hollywood gravitates towards.

It doesn't help that there weren't many hit movies involving World War I in the second half of the 20th century that could inspire movie studios around the globe to take chances on features covering this conflict. World War I movies did exist between the 1980s and 2000s, but they were few and far between, with none of them taking off anywhere near enough to inspire a new wave of World War I movies. Meanwhile, World War II cinema only got more and more popular, especially after titles like Saving Private Ryan. For a while, it looked like World War I would really get all but ignored in the realm of modern cinema.

Why Are World War I Movies Coming Back?

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Of course, the 2010s are when World War I movies got a long overdue resurgence with War Horse in 2011, which kicked off a streak of movies set in The Great War. This included the popular documentary They Shall Not Grow Old, which lent a new level of immediacy to footage of World War I soldiers by translating it into color and then giving it sound. Meanwhile, Wonder Woman and The King’s Man used World War I as a backdrop for larger-than-life blockbuster storylines. World War I had become so ubiquitous again in pop culture that it’s now showing up in everything from award-season darlings to R-rated action films featuring Rhys Ifans as horny Rasputin.

It's not a shocker that Hollywood would eventually turn to World War I again if only because of just how ubiquitous World War II became in mainstream cinema by the late 2010s. If people were still going to do war movies, they needed to come up with new pieces of cinematic language and environments to tell those stories beyond the default norms of World War II narratives. This is where World War I comes into play, it’s a perfect way to offer something different from projects made in the shadow of Saving Private Ryan. Plus, during the 2010s, we experienced the 100th anniversary of World War I starting, putting the conflict on everybody’s mind.

There’s also the grim reality that, unfortunately, World War I movies have become more relevant to the American public. By 2018, just under half of Americans polled by the Pew Research Center had a negative opinion of the then-ongoing Iraq War. While 43% of those polled still held a positive view of this war, it was clear that the Iraq War wasn’t inspiring coast-to-coast pride in Americans. With such a bleak outlook on America’s then-current war, cinematic narratives about another grim war from the past like World War I are a way for people to process the pain of the present. World War I had been ignored in cinematic narratives for decades, but tragically, once the 2010s rolled around, there was no way the movies could ignore World War I and its relevance to the modern world any longer.