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by ijidak 589 days ago
Wow! I've been looking for a good comprehensive WW II movie list with decent historical accuracy! For me, This alone is amazing for you to share!

Would you happen to know of a similarly curated list of World War I movies?

I feel like the quantity and quality of World War I movies is much more sparse!

WW I doesn't have shocking villains like Hitler and the Nazis.

It doesn't have dramatic events like Pearl Harbor and and the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Nor does it have big 20th century figures and personalities like Stalin and Mussolini.

So, while World War II has an endless stream of historical movies, I find that World War I is really hard to find the same for.

2 comments

Glad it's useful! There's a few WWI movies in the spreadsheet but I agree they're much more difficult to find. ChatGPT is actually really good for this though, you can say "Generate a table of 100 WWI movies from diverse points of view" and have a good place to start.
WWI may be less cinematographic, but I think it had a larger effect: fascism and communism were both attractive because immediately after the "Great War", the "war to end all wars", people were eager to latch onto alternatives to the systems and political cultures that had gotten them into it (initially they were suspicious of monarchies; later even of capitalist republics; both communists and fascists thought liberal democracies would soon disappear, the former due to incompatibility with the future as revealed by "science" and "philosophy", the latter due to incompatibility with the past as revealed by "tradition" and "action").

I currently think in terms of a "small XX", running 1914-1991.

Originally I'd wondered where to put the 1990s, but seeing as how the Yugoslav Wars (misinformation-stoked fratricidal wars causing massive refugee influx to neighbouring countries) fit the XXI pattern, I'm willing to start it in 1991. (when it ends will not be my concern)

Lagniappe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_lamps_are_going_out