The best war film of all time according to spectators, it’s him!

Released in 2016 and directed by Mel Gibson, with an average rating of 4.397 stars out of 5, the best war film according to AlloCiné spectators is… You will not kill.

The film tells the incredible true story of Desmond Doss – played by a very driven and Oscar-nominated Best Actor Andrew Garfield – who enlists in the military, determined to save lives on the front line by as a nurse, but who refuses to carry a firearm, out of religious conviction.

His refusal to change his convictions earned him harsh treatment from his comrades and his superiors. And it was armed only with his faith that he entered the hell of war to become one of its greatest heroes.

During the Battle of Okinawa on the impregnable cliff of Maeda, he managed to save dozens of lives alone under enemy fire, bringing wounded soldiers back to safety from the battlefield one by one. An extraordinary feat that earned him the honorary medal of Congress, the highest honor an American can receive, even from the hands of the President of the United States.

“It sheds light on what it means for a man of conviction and faith to find himself in a hellish situation…And, in the midst of this nightmare, this man is able to deepen his spirituality and achieve something something bigger” explained Mel Gibson.

It took ten long years to happily find Mel Gibson behind the camera. It is that the interested party came back from afar: he had not achieved anything since his very impressive Apocalypto. The one who was once at the height of his glory with the harvest of Oscars directed by his Braveheart in 1995, then the absolute triumph – not without controversy – of his Passion of the Christ and its 612 million dollars in Box Office receipts, had become Persona non grata in Hollywood in 2006, after his many slippages.

For this Christian fundamentalist, You will not kill took the place of resurrection, even if Gibson signed for the first time a film of which he was not at the initiative. “I sent the script for Thou Shalt Not Kill to Mel in 2002, then 2010 and finally 2014. His agents had read it, but until I sent it to him for the third time, he had preferred to concentrate on his own projects. In 2014, however, he read it in one go and the next morning he agreed to take the reins of the film” explained the producer of the film, Bill Mechanic.

Cross Creek Pictures Pty Ltd / Mark Rogers

Violence, religion and sacrifice: a trinity which has been the motor and the matrix of his cinema since his Braveheart, with great constancy. In You will not killhe thus takes up the figure of voluntary and individual sacrifice from The Passion of the Christ, but in the context of the Second World War.

Here, Doss’s sacrifice of waging war to save his wounded comrades in battle is sublimated by the vision of the very Hell he is supposed to have refused. Placing the spectator in the position of a soldier, the filmmaker then immerses him in a gigantic open-air butchery, of a completely mad savagery, where Desmond Doss, like a guardian angel, or even downright a saint, brings back to life the tortured and dying bodies of those who fell at the front.

Gibson’s film is therefore at the very top of the basket. With one nuance. It is in fact behind two other films, also classified on the site as war films, Schindler’s List and Tomb of the Fireflies, which have significantly higher averages, respectively 4.582 out of 5 and 4.422 out of 5. But these works are much more historical dramas than war films in the general sense.

Just behind You will not kill includes Michael Cimino’s film, Journey to the End of Hell, which obtains an average of 4.392 out of 5, tied with Apocalypse Now. Followed by Stanley Kubrick’s masterpiece, Paths of Glory, with an average of 4.382 out of 5. Spielberg’s Private Ryan comes only after, with 4.367 out of 5.