10 War Films That Broke All The Rules
8. Come and See
Perhaps the most experimental film listed here, 1985's Come and See took the surreal, magical realist tone of The Godfather director Francis Ford Coppola's earlier Apocalypse Now and extended this approach to its logical conclusion.
Sure, the search for Kurtz takes some strange turns in its long and winding journey upriver, but very little in Coppola's film could be called surreal. Not so with Elem Klimov's unsparing film.
One of the most disturbing pieces of cinema ever created, this two and half hour epic imagines wartime Belarus as a post apocalyptic nightmare, depicting the invasion by Nazi forces as a trippy, terrifying nightmare of upsetting imagery as seen through the eyes of a Belarusian teenager.
Disturbed by witnessing this amoral inhumanity, the protagonist's grip on reality seems to loosen throughout the film, and what begins as a more conventional example of the war film genre gradually borrows imagery from both sci-fi landscapes and fantasy iconography in order to better encapsulate the unimaginable horrors of war.