• You are a movie director and get a huge budget to make the WWII movie of your choice, what story do you tell?


  • Easy.  Do one that hasn’t been given true justice.  This of course is the story of the USS Enterprise, the most decorated warship of WWII.  At one time it was the only operating US fleet carrier fighting Japan.  It missed pearl harbor, fought in the battles of midway, santa cruz (Solomon islands), Philippine sea, and of course Leyte Gulf.


  • Kursk- Done in the style of Longest Day/Waterloo

    Leyte Gulf- done in the style of Tora Tora Tora

    Erich Von Manstein- Done like patton


  • The fall of France.


  • The battle for Singapore.

    Could be a very intense psychological drama from one side, or the story of a plucky commander defying incredible odds and securing an unlikely victory from the other.

    Here are a few flashpoints that the plot could hinge around:

    1. Pride: the Allied High Command thinks that they are invulnerable
    2. Unease: Allied bases all over Pacific fall as the mainland campaign against the Japanese crumbles
    3. Hope: Force Z arrives to save the day
    4. Disappointment: Force Z is sunk
    5. Desperation: bridge is blown
    6. Horror: Japanese infiltrate as civilians, attack in mangrove swamps, come from seemingly everywhere in the jungle
    7. Humiliation: the uncertainties of surrender

  • A remake of “Haie und kleine Fische” - “Sharks and little Fishes” with now available Technolgies and according to the book!, so it is going to be two to three parts.

    And or:

    About two German Brothers who are together in France but different Divisions, one is orderd after this campagne to Africa were the other one is part of the Barbarossa Campagne gets wounded during the winter of ´41 and gets back in mid ´42. When his unit gets refreshed in late ´43 (His brother got killed at the attempt of getteing to El Alamain) he will then take part of the Normandy Campagne all the way back to Germany were his remaing unit surrenders in Bavaria.
    Core value of the movie is to show how German soldiers manage to survive the war from their viewpoint.


  • @BJCard:

    Easy.  Do one that hasn’t been given true justice.  This of course is the story of the USS Enterprise, the most decorated warship of WWII.

    Enterprise had several episodes of a TV series devoted to it…

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1194698/?ref_=fn_al_tt_1

    …but I agree that the series could have been better.


  • I’ll have to think about this to come up with an answer, but it would depend on whether the studio expected me to make a big crowd-pleasing commercial success or an indulge-yourself film like “Tora, Tora Tora” that might have limited appeal beyond people who like military history.  Burt Lancaster used to consciously alternate between films with broad commercial appeal and films (like The Train) aimed more at the art-house crowd.


  • The Fall of Sweden, Quinten Tarantino style


  • I’d like to see a movie made detailing the entire life’s story of Micheal Wittman, obviously with a focus on his accomplishments throughout the war.


  • life’s story of Micheal Wittman

    Yea great idea!


  • On land (and arguably in the air) , I’d pick the Battle of Crete, the first mainly airborne invasion in military history.  It was “the first battle where the German paratroops (Fallschirmjäger) were used on a massive scale, the first time the Allies made significant use of intelligence from the deciphered German Enigma code; and the first time invading German troops encountered mass resistance from a civilian population. […] After one day of fighting, the Germans had suffered very heavy casualties, and the Allied troops were confident that they would prevail against the German invasion. The next day, through miscommunication and the failure of Allied commanders to grasp the situation, Maleme airfield in western Crete fell to the Germans, enabling them to fly in reinforcements and overwhelm the defenders. The battle lasted about 10 days.”

    At sea, I’d pick the cruise of (and the hunt for) one of the German merchant raiders – maybe the Pinguin (a.k.a. Raider F), the most successful commerce raider of the war. (The story of the raider Atlantis has already been put on film in the movie Under Ten Flags.)  The climax would be the single-ship duel between the Pinguin and the British heavy cruiser Cornwall.  The Cornwall wasn’t too badly damaged, though, so the fight wouldn’t be as dramatic as the one shown in the movie The Battle of the River Plate.  So, come to think of it, a better choice might be the Kormoran (Raider G), Germany’s largest merchant raider, which sank ten merchant ships and captured one more.  Kormoran engaged in a single-ship duel with the Australian light cruiser Sydney, which resulted in the loss of both vessels, so this would be a dramatic battle to put on film and the result would be similar to the conclusion of the classic movie The Enemy Below in which the destroyer and the U-boat end up sinking each other.

  • Liaison TripleA '11 '10

    Does the story have to be true? or can it be fiction?


  • @Gargantua:

    Does the story have to be true? or can it be fiction?

    Good point.  And even if the story is true, there’s the question of how historically accurate the cinematic treatment of the actual events can be, and to what extent it can blend those actual events with completely fictional ones (a case in point being the Charlton Heston movie Midway).  Just the other day I was re-watching the 1942 movie “Wake Island”.  It’s about a real battle, and the film claims in its opening credits to be as accurate as possible, but apparently some of the USMC veterans who survived the battle later called the movie one of the greatest works of fiction ever made.

  • Liaison TripleA '11 '10

    If it’s all about the facts, maybe this would be better served as:

    “If you could take a camera crew in an invisible time machine, back to capture any WWII battle or event on film, which would it be?”


  • Model’s suicide in the Ruhr Pocket.


  • The Battle along the The Kokoda Track from both sides. Fighting in the Alps minus the snow and adding Rain Forest.

  • '10

    @Gargantua:

    If it’s all about the facts, maybe this would be better served as:

    “If you could take a camera crew in an invisible time machine, back to capture any WWII battle or event on film, which would it be?”

    Just exactly what is an invisible time machine? Does that mean that you can waltz right up to the enemy and expose film but they cannot see you?


  • A movie about the Canadian Zombies and efforts to round them up before they took over warm climate areas.

    It would be a two part movie franchise:

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_Crisis_of_1917
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_Crisis_of_1944

    In either cases, when the army could not find soldiers to fight, zombies would overrun towns keeping Canada from getting soldiers to go to Europe.

    A Zombie version of Lorne Green would lead the Zombie faction


  • Germany’s Norwegian campaign.  The Norwegians resisted German invasion the longest outside of the Soviets.

Suggested Topics

Axis & Allies Boardgaming Custom Painted Miniatures

29

Online

17.0k

Users

39.3k

Topics

1.7m

Posts