The best war films of 2024
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Terrorism. I just find bombs and I find dead people. But it's a really scary thing for me. I'm Roland Oliphant and this is Battle Lines. In this episode of Battle Lines, chief film critic Robbie Collin joins me to look back on the best war films of the year.

Battlelines is a podcast about conflict and war, and part of the reason we launched it is simply because there seems to be more conflict in the world at the moment. Put bluntly, we're entering an era of geopolitical instability and confrontation, and the past year seems to have borne out that editorial decision, very sadly. But

How is this moment in history affecting culture? Are we making more films about conflict and about wars? And what do the films we make and see say about our own attitudes to this current era? To discuss this, I'm very excited to say I'm joined by Robbie Collin, The Telegraph's chief film critic. Robbie, welcome to Battlelines. Thank you for having me. Lovely to be here.

I asked you when you came on, before we were coming on, to come up with your best recommendations. We're going to get into your recommendations of the best war conflict films of the year. I want to throw a couple of questions at you before we start. First thing is, is war and conflict, or this era of war and conflict, do you think being reflected in the films we're seeing at the moment? I think it isn't yet, by and large. I think there is a really interesting...

The three films that I've chosen from this year are three great exceptions to that rule. But if you think back about how war has been portrayed in cinema over the last couple of decades, really since September 11th, it's been prosecuted by super beings against super villains. And it's been incredibly escapist and it's been incredibly divorced from reality. And it's that kind of... It's another, I think, another version of...

the war films and the action films of the 1980s when America was smarting from its humiliation in Vietnam. So it would re-prosecute that war on screen in these kind of fantasy versions where Rambo would kind of tear in and mow down all the villains with his machine gun fire, set the place alight and, you know, rescue the hostages. And everything was fine because America's great. And I think this sort of humbling of the US on the global stage that, you know, that 9/11 entailed

has led to another version of that where it's like, you know, we're going to generate these fantastical characters who can win and, you know, and save the day for the US and the world at large and kind of re-establish, you know, reaffirm America's reputation as the global superpower that can pull this stuff off. So yeah, for me, it has been a

a strange time for war films but now maybe because of these broader political shifts that you mentioned there that is changing and I do think the three films I've chosen today do reflect that Those three films that you've picked actually the kind of

I suppose the desk editor in me, the kind of person looking out for a page layout, was quite pleased by that. Because, not to give it away, we'll get into them in a second, but there's one about soldiers, there's one about civilians, and there's one about journalists. It's nice, kind of neatly broken down. Were you conscious of that when you were picking them? I was not, no. I just looked back through my viewing diary for the last 12 months and chose the best three. But yeah, it's interesting that they do seem to cover quite a broad thematic range. I would say...

The first one is, although it's set in a wartime context, it's about issues that are broader than... I mean, really, all three are about issues that are broader than war, but they all use war as a backdrop through which to explore them. Mm-hmm.

And lastly, we'll get into this, but on this broader theme still. I mean, your job is, before we came on, you were joking about how what you do is the frivolous stuff, but is what you're doing, has it been affected by all of this dramatic events of the past couple of years? Ukraine, Gaza, God knows what else going on, this kind of sense of so on, or are you over on the artist's desk kind of just, I don't know, jollying along? I mean, I would say, you know, as journalists of a society

species, we are culture writers still kind of interested in what's going on in the world and we still respond to that in our work. But the film industry is incredibly solipsistic and self-contained and so it will kind of fight with itself and it will kind of obsess over issues that it finds wildly important. But often geographically enormous topics like war and

sometimes do have to be imposed on it from without when they kind of they take a while to catch up the studios and realize that yeah actually this is something that we should be listening to artists and writers about you know there is something to be said here and there is there is an issue to dig into I would say the the third film on my list was conceived in the absolute heat of the topical moment for when its writer director thought it up and

It's a rare example of Hollywood or I mean that was a more independent film but it was made in a very fleet way and it was made very reactively and responding to a situation that is live in the world now and remains so.

All right. Well, without further ado, Robbie, what is your first top pick for your top three, I believe, best war films of 2024? Yes. So my first one is a slight cheat because it was actually released at the end of 2023, but it was re-released this year. So I'm going to allow myself

We're the only ones who can decide the future of this country. The life of that monster is too unknown. What?

I love Godzilla because, like James Bond, he's one of those super versatile national metaphors. So he will change in order to meet the changing national mood. Just as Bond does in the UK, Godzilla will in Japan. And so, famously, the first Godzilla film from 1954 was about Japan reckoning with its supreme vulnerability in the face of nuclear warfare.

And it's an incredibly sad and harrowing film, still enormously holds up today. It's very, very scary and very moving. But then as Japan's post-war resurgence begins, Godzilla kind of transforms into this jolly giant who's flexing on the world stage and, you know, breezing around, defeating these rival monsters. And then when the economic bubble bursts in Japan, there's this return to horror and more reflective mood and so on. So Godzilla Minus One is really interesting because like

2016's Shin Godzilla. It was made in the aftermath of the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami when Japanese populations come into terms with the fact that neither the state nor the wider world can be depended upon to come to the rescue in these kind of national crises.

Now, Shin Godzilla, which was the previous Godzilla film, was an especially bitter and horrific take on that. I love that film, but it is absolutely not for everyone. Godzilla Minus One is more optimistic and much more accessible. The Minus One part of the title is because it's set in the aftermath of World War Two, when Japan was at this historically low ebb, below zero. And it follows a kamikaze pilot called Shikishima, who is essentially wimped out of his mission.

and feigned technical faults in his aircraft, gone off and landed on this remote air base on an island where the normal-sized Godzilla creature lives. And then he is, of course, affected by the Bikini Atoll atomic tests and then becomes enormous and goes to wreak havoc in Tokyo.

I'll say it's an incredibly exciting film. The special effects are incredible. Famously, back in March, it became the first non-Western film to win a visual effects Oscar. And, you know, you get the destruction of downtown Tokyo that you would expect from a Godzilla film. He's stomping around, you know, the Ginza's being levelled. And there's all sorts of havoc, screaming crowds and things. There's also a great sequence where he's pursuing a ship through Tokyo Bay, stomping across farmland. It's really spectacular. There's also a late close-up on his face where he looks...

about as nasty as he has ever looked in the last 70 years. But it's also this incredibly moving film about survivor's guilt. And I think in a strange way, the black and white version is more powerful because the color grade has been done in such a way as to really recreate the texture of 1954 cinematography. So it's not just a case of dialing down the color value on the image. It's a case of, you know, regrading the whole thing so it looks like it was shot at that time.

And Shikishima's wrestling with the fact that, of course, all of his colleagues in the Air Force have died because they were kamikaze pilots. He has, through his own cowardice, managed to survive the war in a way that his more heroic compatriots did not survive.

Again, he survives the first Godzilla attack on Tokyo and the survivor's guilt compounds. And then the film is kind of about harnessing that national guilt and rechanneling it towards something more positive. So at the end, there's this sort of public-private partnership effort in order to kind of finally bring Godzilla to heel once and for all. In a year where there have been...

countless examples to the contrary, it's a blockbuster that is moving as well as visually astonishing. And I will freely cop to weeping multiple times during this when I saw it in the cinema. And it's one that I've recommended to a lot of people and they've all said, "Do you know what? I thought I knew what Godzilla was." And there's so much more depth and so much more texture to it. So that's Godzilla Minus One. Unfortunately,

The black and white minus colour version is currently only available on this incredibly expensive collector's edition box set.

So if you want to see it, you do have to shell out, I think, more than £50. But the normal film, the colour version, is now freely available, DVD streaming, Blu-ray, whatever. I watched it on Netflix. There you go. Yes, it's on Netflix. But I think I did see the black and white version next to it on Netflix. Oh, do they have it on Netflix? Yeah, the night before last night. Well, look. So it must be up there. And I regret, actually, I thought, because like everyone else you've spoken to, I thought, Godzilla, it's a monster movie. Yes. And I thought, oh, they black and whited it.

That sounds like a bit of a gimmick. I won't bother with that. But I wish I'd watched it now because it was, as you say, incredibly powerful movie. Yeah, I think if you have the option of the two, do try the black and white one first off because there's something about that anchoring it in the visual texture of the time that makes it that bit more...

emotionally plangent I would say because it's very much about that time and I've never seen I'm not an expert on Japanese film I suppose but I found I found it pretty bold taking the subject of a kamikaze pilot a kamikaze pilot who has you know chickened out of his mission essentially and grappling with you know the shame so a lot of it's about shame a lot of it's about guilt and

you know, he comes back and that, you know, his neighborhood of Tokyo has been completely flattened in the firebombing. And it's a very good, I found myself thinking a lot about places like, like Kharkiv in Ukraine, for example, like it was very, very like that sense of what happens when civilian areas are completely destroyed. And, and the, the horror of, of what, you know, post-war Japan was like, um, and he's got this neighbor who, who,

calls him a coward. Yes. Tells him, this is all your fault. You know, if you'd done your job, then this would be... You know, I'd still have my kids. And he has to grapple with that. And the other thing, of the films on your list, it seems to me this is the most kind of open... Like, the metaphor is impossible to miss. Yes. Like, Godzilla is...

Godzilla is war itself that he can't shake because his war is not over and he drags it around with him and it also seems to be almost his own kind of his kind of psychological curse like every time he thinks he's getting his life back on track his PTSD comes back the monster shows up for some reason the monster's coming to Tokyo and then it's going to like the neighbourhood of Tokyo where his girlfriend's working for example very unlucky you know um

I'm interested in you bouncing off that because I found it an engrossing but also very challenging thing to watch at times, especially the stuff with his mental breakdowns and how he's coping with...

with all these issues. Yeah, I mean, I think this is something that I admire about all of the Godzilla films is that he's such a versatile metaphor. He, she, it. I don't know the Godzilla pronouns, I'm not sure. But he can represent so many things. And in Shin Godzilla, the previous film, it was much more about unfathomable horror. It was almost Lovecraftian, you know, this kind of creature just

heaving itself out of the ocean and it was a the most hideous version of Godzilla that's been you know kind of crusty and falling to pieces and all this all this stuff and the the fire breath was more like vomit and it was really kind of viscerally revolting version of the of the monster but here he absolutely represents the the specter of his his failure and the fact that the war itself becomes psychologically inescapable and

There is a Godzilla film. Ah, which one is it? It's from the early noughties in which Godzilla is the physical instantiation of the souls of everyone the Japanese army killed during World War II. So it kind of reverses the metaphor. It's not about a nation that has been victimized.

and annihilated, but it's about the annihilation which that nation has carried out. That's very interesting, because when I was thinking about this, and I was just drawn in about how moving this was, and what an exploration it was of how Japan coped with defeat and finding a new sense of itself, and at the back of my mind was all that stuff that it doesn't talk about, but Godzilla has spoken about that in the past. The series has spoken about everything you could care to imagine. I mean, there's eco-Godzilla stuff, as I say, there's Japan as aggressor, there's Japan as victim,

There's Japan as colourful cartoon lovable rogue on the world stage. You would be amazed at how much can be wrung out of this this rubber suit over the last seven decades.

Well, I found it absolutely remarkable. I highly endorse your choice, actually, having watched that. Moving on, what is your next film? And that is, by the way, for listeners, that was the one that is basically about soldiers, about veterans, really, because it's just after the war, but that's the one about soldiers. The next one on your list is about... This is about civilians. So this choice is Blitz, which is a new film from Britain's own Steve McQueen. It's set during London in the Second World War. My mum sent me away.

"She did it to keep you safe." "Your son did not arrive at his destination." "You're responsible for his safety." "Why can't you tell me where's my boy?" "This is for all the parents whose children have been evacuated and for my boy George." It opened the London Film Festival and it was briefly in cinemas in November but not many cinemas because it's an Apple TV+ production.

And Apple TV Plus, for their own reasons, are incredibly touchy about box office figures. So they will tend to give their films these sort of tokenistic theatrical releases because they want to funnel customers towards subscribing to Apple TV Plus in order to watch. And I think with this film, it's a real shame because to me, it's an incredible big screen experience. I mean, Steve McQueen...

was this Turner Prize winning video artist who moved from there into commercial cinema. But he has incredible mainstream instincts. I don't know if you remember Widows from a few years back, the thriller that he did with Liam Neeson, which was just terrific. Then this has this real kind of David Lean or Steven Spielberg quality where it's about the, you know,

the little folk responding in extremists. It's told from the perspective of a nine-year-old boy from the East End called George, who's played by Elliot Heffernan. He's evacuated from London, but he slips off the train to make his way back to his mother, who's a singer and a munitions factory worker, played by Saoirse Ronan. And along the way, he has this sort of quasi-Dickensian odyssey through the capital. And like Dickens, I think McQueen is trying to capture the full social texture of the place at the time.

The key to it is that George is mixed race, so his father was black and was deported, and Saoirse Rowland's character has been raising him as a single mother. I'll be with help from Paul Weller, who plays his lovable grandad. Oh, is that Paul Weller? That is Paul Weller. I had no idea. I love the fact that the film does not make a big fuss about it. You know, they sit him down at the piano, he does his little kind of pub sing-along stuff, but it's not like, here's rock god Paul Weller in a film for the first time. They just kind of let him...

be there and part of the broader social fabric. So Steve McQueen's parents were both, I think, Windrush migrants. They were certainly from the Caribbean and his films are often interested in black British culture and the place of black Britons in the wider national fabric. I don't know if you saw the Small Axe series that he did for BBC which kind of, it came out in dribs and drabs during Covid and

And it was initially meant to be in cinemas, but I think it may still be on iPlayer. That's a great case in point. And I think Blitz is a spiritual partner to those films. George, at the start of the film, essentially sees his race as a physical characteristic rather than an aspect of his heritage. And what he discovers while travelling through Blitz-ravaged London is

is his place in this society and not just a place that's already established but a place that is still being hewn out for him and which he will be and his generation will be a part of carving out for themselves. So to me when McQueen's showing these vistas of London consumed by fire it's like he's kind of saying from these fires

the post-Empire Britain was forged. This is an absolute turning point in British history, where we're moving from empire to post-empire. We're reassessing

what our position is on the world stage, what we're capable of, what we need help in order to achieve still. And he's looking at that from the civilian perspective. I think he does it incredibly sensitively and richly. There's a great sequence where George meets a black air raid warden, played by the musician Benjamin Clementine, who kind of takes him under his wing and explains what it is to be black. And George says, are you black? Am I black? Because he almost doesn't compute that

heritage and physical characteristics connect in certain ways. When you describe what the film's about it can sound very chin-strokey. I think it's also an incredibly exciting piece of filmmaking in terms of having that Spielbergian quality of throwing recognisable characters into these extreme situations. There's some terrific scenes of high drama with bombs falling, London underground corridors flooding, set pieces that are more

more exciting and more grandly achieved than in 90% of the year's blockbusters. And yes, you mentioned the bombed out Tokyo suburbs in Godzilla Minus One, those images being redolent of Ukraine today. For the most part, Blitz is made in this quite heritage-y style, but there are shots of the East End with these gutted remains of houses, you know, like kind of jagged teeth sticking up.

that felt incredibly contemporary and there is no way that McQueen did not think when he was including those in the film we need to make these images remind people of news images that are coming out of Ukraine I mean the likeness is just too startling for me to be a coincidence or Gaza indeed or Gaza in fact yes yeah that to me

Well, it's interesting what you said about Apple TV because for the benefit of the listeners, we're recording this in mid-December-ish. I managed to watch this last night. I found it in one cinema in London and it was in a tiny little screen with about 12 seats in it. I enjoyed it. It was a nice intimate experience.

Yeah, especially that it's got a very powerful opening, which starts with London Fire Brigade responding to a burning building and a fire hose gets out of control and is running around, knocks someone out, all of this. I think it's a very powerful opening, punches you in the face, gets you straight in there. And it's very close to the kind of gritty, mundane intimacy, I think, of the contemporary wars. I speak about Ukraine because I've been there a lot. I haven't spent time in Gaza, but...

are the first responders. And you'll frequently find yourself in these places where the flames are still going, the smoke's coming up, and the guys are laying out the hoses and the water and so on. The other interesting thing I wanted to pick up on, which maybe it's a common thread actually, I want to come back to common threads later, but you talked about how he's talking about this pivotal point in British society. Mm-hmm.

It sounds kind of similar to Godzilla in that sense, which is a part of Godzilla is about, you know, what is this new Japan going to be and what are the new values going to be that's going to form it? Maybe it's not fair to put them completely alongside each other, but this kind of looking back at the war as a moment that shaped the society we're in now, is that something that our treatment of the war is doing now? Yes, I mean, I think both films certainly see war as being a national inflection point.

There's a before and there's an after. And by, you know, walking through the fire, you end up somewhere different. And the whole place is irrevocably changed as a result of it. That's less the case in choice number three, which is in which the war feels kind of like an entropic end point in a nation's story. We'll come to that. I'm sure we'll get to that. Yes. But yes, absolutely. I think there is a kind of a sense that

There's more to war than the war itself. You know, there's the circumstances under which the war kind of flares up, but then there's also the efforts to repair and rebuild on and reassess afterwards. And the landscape is kind of physically reshaped by it, but also psychologically reshaped. Where does this fit in the tradition of

British war films about Britain and about the Blitz. I was thinking about it and when I went into it, I was a little bit jaded because I thought, oh God, the Blitz. It's going to be Anderson Shelters and Vera Lynn and we know all the tropes and so on. And then I was watching it and I thought, actually, when was the last time I saw a film that was really about the Blitz itself and also about

About working class people at the receiving end of it. Yeah, I mean, to me, that's the David Lean connection. It's going back to that mid-century heritage style of British filmmaking. And interestingly, when the film played London Film Festival, a number of critics were quite underwhelmed by it. I think disappointed that McQueen had gone in that quite small C conservative direction because he was certainly...

his early films like Hunger and Shame are incredibly provocative and they're tough watches and they are for a particular audience. And the idea that he's working for a broader audience now, and you know, the same themes that he's been interested in throughout his career do keep coming back. This idea that, you know, one of the themes of small acts is that, you know, all these points in British history are

Was he saying, you know, let's remember there are Black Britons here too, and this is how they fitted into the picture, and how they didn't fit into the picture. And this was going on also, and I just want to remind you of this. But without kind of hiving it off and making it its own kind of separate thing, he's very interested in positioning the Black British community within the broader national fabric. So yes, the idea that McQueen was kind of tacking mainstream politics

upset a few people, I think. Certainly among critics. Is he attacking mainstream kind of... Oh no, not attacking mainstream, sorry, attacking. He's moving towards the mainstream. He's adopting this very traditional style, I would say, in order to... But then he's meeting the time period with again, like the black and white version of Godzilla Minus One. He's meeting the time period and the visual style in which we associate with that time. Is he challenging our assumptions about

Not assumptions about the Blitz. I mean, I feel like there's been a period of... Well, maybe not a period, maybe it's always been going on since 1945, but of kind of rosy-tinted triumphalism in a way. And I put kind of... You know, everyone loved Dunkirk and everybody loved Finest Hour and all of this. And in a way, that was very old-fashioned kind of waving of the Union Jack, I felt. Um...

Here, he talks about racism, he talks about less pleasant parts of society, he talks about labour relations,

He talks about the authorities not actually really being willing to open the tube stations, which is true at the beginning of the bits, and people having to fight for that, people taking it into their own hands. He's got an appearance of a real-life kind of socialist hero, this Jewish dwarf. Yes, that's right, the Jewish chap from the East End, yes. Yes, this is a guy called Mickey Davis, who was...

I can't remember his profession, but he was a small Jewish guy from the East End, from down at Spitalfields or so on. And he did, it's absolutely true, he ended up becoming the organiser of this underground bomb shelter, which when it started, you know, there was nowhere to go to the toilet, the whole place stank and so on. He became a little bit of a hero. And you can still find these little biographies of him on...

kind of small socialist websites. So all of these things. And then, of course, there's the... He shows that dark, seedy underbelly of crime that you get in any kind of war with these horrible looters who go around kind of cutting the rings off...

dead people who've just been hit by bombs and so on. Yeah, and I think this to me is why the film feels so Dickensian as though there is this concerted effort to show all these different tiers of society, all these different bubbles of, you know, mini population groups interacting and how they work around each other. There's a sustained sequence in it that shows the bombing of the Café de Paris

which the looters then descend on the wreckage of the cafe to pull the rings off the fingers of the corpses. This was a West End club? Yes, that's right. And it was, I think the way in which it's depicted in the film is entirely historically accurate. It was quite painstakingly reconstructed that night down to the nature of the band that were on stage and all of this stuff and the time at which the bombs hit.

So, yes, there is absolutely great efforts have been gone to in order to show that this is, you know, all the different cogs whirring away that make up a city and I suppose that make up a nation at large and how these additional cogs are being slotted in. There's a really, really interesting sequence where George finds himself in one of the...

upmarket shopping arcades off Piccadilly at night and he's looking in the windows of the various shops along there and he can see, you know, I suppose the spoils of empire, right? There are kind of sweets made from sugar that's come from the Caribbean and there are, you know, these fantastic silks and fabrics that have been imported, spices and what have you. And then he sees, I think, in a shop window display

I don't know, it's like kind of waxwork natives, I suppose, to kind of show what kind of exotic climes these products have come from. And he's given this great moment of reflection where it's like, is this how this country sees me? And is this how this country is going to see me and people like me going forward? And it's unspoken, you know, it's just kind of communicated through the framing and through the shot choices. But it's just, you know, it's all bubbling away. And I think this is something that Blitz has been

I would see underrated by a number of critics is that how much is taking away in the background for us to kind of contemplate. So is this really a film... I mean, I suppose before we move on to the next one, is it really a film about war and about the Second World War and about the Blitz or is it a film about, I suppose, about our kind of contemporary...

British culture, because it's very much steeped in that. It's very self-consciously talking about the themes of empire, about the themes of racism and the multi-ethnic makeup of Britain. Is it really a Second World War film, or is it a 2010s, British film? Yeah, I mean, I would say it's certainly made with a contemporary audience in mind and with those issues in mind. But I do think it's looking sincerely at the roots of those

contemporary talking points in that point in history and to kind of position Britain under siege

as a point in which the nation had to kind of reflect about what it was, what its values were and where it was going to go from that point and what it no longer was as well. That point actually brings us to your third film very nicely. Yes. What a country was and what it no longer is. Okay, okay. So this, yes. So my third choice is my favourite of the three. It's also one of the films for me of all of 2024. It's Civil War.

which is a new film from Alex Garland, who wrote 28 Days Later and directed Ex Machina, among others. Every time I survived the war zone, I thought I was sending a warning home. Don't do this. But here we are. There's some kind of misunderstanding here. What? We're American, okay? Okay. What kind of American are you? You don't know?

It's a dystopian thriller set in an alternate, very, very, very near future version of the United States that is essentially turned on itself and started tearing itself apart.

And brilliantly, and to me, this is the film's defining masterstroke. We don't know why and we never find out why. So all we know is that there's this president played by Nick Offerman, who's in his third term. So, you know, read into that what you will. And he is at war with a Western alliance made up of California and Texas. And there are some other smaller states joining this group. I love that Garland picked California and Texas because obviously they're both rich, mighty, big players.

you know, even on the world stage, people know what California and Texas stand for. They produce a lot of things and, you know,

but they're not obvious political bedfellows. So he's giving us no sort of olive branch to say, okay, you know what kind of guys these are, you know what kind of guys these are, and these are the two sides. He's just giving you no sort of help on that front whatsoever. And Kirsten Dunn stars as a war photographer modelled on Lee Miller, who's chronicling the nation's downfall from within. Now, like Blitz, it is a big film that's grappling with big issues. And this one is, it's about, it's about politics now, of course, but it's also about culture more broadly now.

the way that we kind of construe everything through the framework of picking sides. So it's a film about how politics now has become, particularly American politics, but also Western politics more broadly, but also culture more broadly in general.

Everything is being understood through the framework of picking sides. So every talking point you can imagine, there are two arguments and you have to choose one and you have to choose the one that your team supports. Now, when you spell it out, that's clearly a ludicrous way of looking at any sort of ethical, political argument. But it is kind of where contemporary discourse is right now.

And one of the things I love most about Civil War was the flailing panic it induced in commentators who are very used to that sides-picking dynamic, perhaps younger than me, shall we say, who have perhaps grown up with that culture. And they're very acclimatised to having Hollywood's professed values align with their own.

So when a film comes along that offers no reassurance that the in crowd are in fact the in crowd and you're okay, your views are the correct ones and you align with Iron Man, you align with the Guardians of the Galaxy or whoever.

When a film does not extend that courtesy to the audience, they lose the threat. You know, Garland is not even trying to both sides anything. He's asking us to reflect on the notion of side taking itself as being ultimately destructive. And he's showing us where that sort of moral ontology will ultimately lead, which is a conflict that we do not understand. The only thing we understand about it is

is there is this group and there is that group and they are tearing lumps out of each other until one group is no longer left. Ideologically, I love this film. I'd describe it in my review as Apocalypse Now for centrists and I absolutely stand by that. But it's brilliantly acted as well. Kirsten Dunst is fabulous in this. Jesse Plemons turns up for one scene as this militia member

one who's just unforgettably blood-curdling. Stephen McKinley Henderson plays this old-school print journalist who goes back on the road alongside Dunst in order to cover the conflict. And I think people think of Alex Garland as a writer-director with the emphasis on writer. But the action in this is incredibly well-directed. There's lots of very tense moments, and the climactic siege on the White House is so well done. And it kind of concludes in this way where someone wins, right?

But then there's a lingering image over the end credits that has its redolent of certain images from war that makes me think, well, hold on, if this is what victory looks like, why are we pursuing it? And I think that its willingness to thumb its nose at the entire sort of discursive framework that sprung up around culture and all issues in the last 15 years

is to me totally wonderful. And I think I love the fact that people didn't get along with it. I love the fact that I did. If I want to be on any writer's side, it's Alex Garland. That's fascinating. Civil War, obviously, you know, we actually discussed it with David Knowles, actually, asked me to talk about this on this podcast when it came out. Really interested to see how you loved it, didn't you? And I found it quite irritating.

I didn't know what it was to start with. I just kind of took myself to the cinema one night and, you know, couldn't sleep, didn't know what to do. I found myself watching this film about my job.

And I couldn't help sitting there kind of picking things apart going, well, act. You wouldn't do that, would you? Or, yeah, no, here's the thing that really got up my nose. And it's something you see in a lot of films about journalists. They never file. That's very true. That's very true. The job is kind of you sort of head off somewhere nebulously, float around for a while, just absorb colour.

But then never actually sit down and write the copy. Yes, exactly. Which really got on my nose. Which made me come to the thought, I mean, I think actually this film is about all the things you were talking about. It's not really a film about journalism per se. The journalists are, I think in a similar way to George in Blitz, they're kind of, we sit on their shoulders and they can take us through this. It's almost like an odyssey, right? It's kind of...

incident after incident and you come to one island, you come to the next island and you have this adventure, it's often a hair-raising adventure that you get out with the skin of your teeth and that shows the audience almost in a touristic way through this conflict. Yes, and I think the use of journalists as notionally impartial observers is absolutely why Garland's alighted on that profession over another. Obviously they've got to be mobile within the war zone but they're not allied officially to one side or the other.

And also they are on the front line even so, you know, and their lives are at risk. And there's a lovely kind of master-apprentice relationship in the film between Kirsten Dunst and Kayleigh Spaney, who starred in Sofia Coppola's Priscilla. She plays a young aspiring war photographer who comes along with her digital camera, right, where Dunst has got the real serious photojournalist kit. And it's about kind of...

trying to bear objective witness I think to what's going on but also the supreme difficulty of actually wrestling yourself around to a position of objectivity you know those are the issues that Garland's interested in you know the nature of objectivity and subjectivity and how easy it is to fall into destructive patterns of thinking when

when you have two sides at each other's throats. Garland is not a journalist. I don't think he's ever done any journalism. He talks about how he was once an aspiring war correspondent who he did speak of in an interview about how that young girl who's kind of putting herself in a dangerous situation that the older journalist has to grab her at the beginning and say, what the hell are you doing? And I think he said he was that person for about six months before someone took him aside and said...

what the hell are you doing? Are you trying to get yourself killed? And he thought, okay, maybe not. Did he ever file? I don't know if he did, actually. If he didn't, it would explain a lot.

It would do. I mean, that was, it's about a photographer, right? And she has this writer along for the ride who never seems to open his laptop and file copy and just seems to be there to be the war junkie. But does that film still stand up? Or is that film a pre-election, pre-second Trump film? Does it still stand up now that we have? Because it was largely about the anxiety of that moment of, is there going to be a civil war when it came out? Is there going to be a civil war if Trump doesn't win the election? Well, he's won the election. There isn't a civil war. Is it still watchable now?

Do you know, I've not rewatched it since the election took place. I think that to me it's really fascinating that Trump winning almost took the poison out of the situation in a peculiar way. People seem resigned to it in a way that they weren't first time round. And I mean, certainly within Hollywood, within the film industry.

they realised that the 2016 hyper-partisan approach, it was no good for anybody because it alienated a vast swathe of their potential domestic audience by saying, you know, "Oh, we're not making these films for you. We're making films for progressive people, nice people." And so anyone who voted Republican was kind of just removed themselves from that part of the media ecosystem. And then, you know, as we've seen on YouTube and various streaming platforms, you know, a separate kind of Republican parallel media has sprung up around that.

And I think the studios realised that that was destructive and it obviously didn't affect any meaningful political change because here he is again, you know, more kind of popular than ever. It's the kind of if you can't beat him, join him thing. You know, Groucho Marx is, you know, these are my values and if you don't like them, I have others. So, yeah, I don't know. Maybe it would have felt more raw now if he hadn't won. But then I don't know. I don't know. Perhaps...

Perhaps the American left, even his left, is sort of licking its wounds and they're going to come back full of new rage and fury and it's all going to blow up once more. Can I seize on these thoughts and kind of try to draw everything together that we've spoken about? Because I think one of the things about civil war I've whinged about...

they never file their story and, you know, no journalist would do that and so on. Every film about journalists, journalists complain about this stuff. Of course, of course. Do you remember The Holiday, the rom-com with Kate Winslet as a telegraph writer? And The Office was like a kind of a castle or something. I mean, just the most kind of ornate, beautiful thing ever. And...

many, many people have said is, to me, is working at the Telegraph like being Kate Winslet in the holiday and in no respects whatsoever is it like that. Well, exactly. And famously, Tintin was meant to be a reporter. Yes, right, exactly. He's never been in a newsroom as far as I can tell or ever had a byline. But the thing I wanted to get with, well, I think that film does get right is

are these, like the realism of war, I do think it does a pretty good job of painting what a civil war might actually look like in contemporary America from the kind of the breakdown of law and order, the vigilantism, the shortage of fuel, the Jesse Plemons scene you described. So there's a lot of points in that movie where, you know, if you've done some war reporting, you can find yourself in that scene. That particular scene...

I don't think that's a situation that many people have been in because people who are in that scene don't get out of it alive. Like there's that moment at the end where they escape. That is so the movie can carry on. I thought that was extremely realistic. I think we've all encountered people like that. But once you're at that point, that's when the war crime happens. So why am I saying all this? I'm saying all this because I wanted you on the podcast because we're about war, about conflict. And as I said at the beginning,

We seem to be in this renewed era of conflict. That film very much is about bringing conflict home and telling us about it. Is there a common theme here between everything you've discussed, each of these films, that bring it together and grabs a zeitgeist? Or am I trying too hard to put you into a box? No, no, I think there is. And I think the common theme is that ultimately opting out of this stuff is not an option. You can't kind of decide...

not to be at war because it's happening on such an immeasurably larger scale than the individual can possibly hope to influence. It's something into which any of us could be plunged, I think, you know, whether that's contemporary America or Britain during the 1940s or Japanese civilians in the 40s. There are these kind of enormous history-chewing cogs at work in the world.

And we have to come to terms with that, right? We have to reckon with that somehow. And if we want to avoid a scenario like the one Garland depicts in Civil War, that has to begin before the two sides start bombing chunks out of each other. It's got to be, it's a fundamentally cultural change has to happen, if even that's enough. But I think...

Godzilla, in its own way, shows that sometimes nothing's enough. And it's just this awful kind of fact of the human condition. That metaphor when he starts storming into Tokyo, there is nothing they can do to stop him. He just flattens huge swathes of the city.

so obviously this metaphor for war and they are powerless to do anything about it. The first point at which I wept was during his attack on downtown Tokyo. He's kind of stomping through the Ginza and derailing trains and people are kind of running for cover. And then he does the nuclear breath, which has been a feature of Godzilla since the very start. But I think this is the first time in which the nuclear breath manifests as a mushroom cloud.

And the shot of the civilians kind of seeing this thing on the horizon erupt in the same way that, you know, in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the people living there must have seen this thing and just knowing this is it. You know, there's no imaginable escape from this. I find that incredibly powerful.

So yes, it was that kind of just facing down your own destruction I found really, really kind of moving. And is there a reason all of these films seem to focus on... They seem to focus on very, if you were there in the time, almost the mundane, everyday impacts on everyday people. It seems to me all of these films do kind of look at that from...

from the ants' eye view, if you see what I mean. Yeah, because I think in cinema, the human angle is generally the most interesting one. You know, it's an art form that's sort of capable of putting on an incredible show at an incredible scale. But for the show to matter...

you've got to recognise yourself in it, I think. And so I think that's why these three films particularly have stood out to me. Brilliant. Robbie Golan, thank you very much. Any films you want to flag that are coming up that people should be aware of in the new year? Goodness, OK. So, look, I'm going to say...

The Brutalist, which is this American epic that's coming out in early January in cinemas. It's three and a half hours long. It has an intermission, which I am all for. The return of intermissions during enormous films is great. And it's kind of related to war in its own way. So Adrian Brody plays this Hungarian Jewish Holocaust survivor and Bauhaus-trained architect who flees Europe for the United States in order to pursue his dream of freedom.

modernist, brutalist architecture. And he finds a wealthy patron, played by Guy Pearce, who funds this kind of insane development on a hill in Pennsylvania, which is part church, part library, part fitness suite. This impossible construction. And again, in its own peculiar way, it's about the wheels of history catching an individual between them and what becomes of that individual. And, you know, like...

Like those kind of great 70s and 80s American epics, I mean, Once Upon a Time in America was the film, the only film this really reminded me of. He's not a criminal, he's an architect, so he's pursuing success legitimately. But it's about, you know, what I suppose it takes to be successful in America and how the kind of various neuroses of that young nation come to bear on people that come into it. And, you know, when you have this influx of Europeans after the war, you know,

how that changed the cultural fabric of the... I mean, it's an enormous film in terms of its scope and what it's kind of talking about. For three and a half hours, it flies along. I mean, because you're watching, like, an hour 45 and then a 15-minute break on an hour 45. And...

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American Public University. Value for the whole family. Learn more at apu.apus.edu slash military. Both halves are nippy, so it feels like you've been well-nourished but with zero effort. So I would enormously recommend that. I think it's probably going to be my favorite film of the coming Oscar season. Fantastic. The Brutalist. The Brutalist. Robbie Cullen, thank you so much for joining us on Battlelands. Thank you.

Battle Lines is an original podcast from The Telegraph, created by David Knowles. The producer is Yolaine Goffin. The executive producer is Louisa Wells. To stay on top of all our news, analysis and dispatches from the ground in Israel and Gaza, subscribe to The Telegraph or sign up to Dispatches, which brings stories from our award-winning foreign correspondents straight to your inbox. We also have a live blog on our website where you can follow updates as they come in throughout the day, including insights from contributors to this podcast.

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