10 War Movie Cliches That Annoy EVERYONE

A cliche from wider cinema that bleeds into war films, movies typically depict gunfights full of fully automatic gunfire. While firearms hold a finite amount of ammunition, modern war films frequently show soldiers firing their weapons at the enemy in seemingly endless fashion. To make things even more irritating, these characters often don't even realistically reload their weapons despite firing enough bullets to take down King Kong.

While editing techniques can obscure continuity where reloads could have potentially taken place, there's another prevalent cliche as far as those films that depict modern combat go - every soldier has their gun set to full-auto when more often than not semi-automatic fire is encouraged. A technique practised in the interests of accuracy and conserving ammunition in real life, war movies often eschew depicting this firing method in favour of the considerably more dramatic hail of fully automatic gunfire.

While high-profile examples like Where Eagles Dare or Inglourious Basterds prove that first-rate war movies don't have to be entirely grounded in realism for success, for those films set in the modern day, it can prove distracting. It's not that full-auto is never used, but it's the exception and not the rule.