Top 10 Epic Battles

Saving Private Ryan (1998): Omaha Beach

From the stomach-churning, visceral recreation of the D-Day landing sequence, in which US Rangers in the infamous Dog Green sector on Omaha beach fight through a killing zone that caused 90% casualties among the first wave, to the terrifying last stand among the bombed-out remains of a Normandy village. Saving Private Ryan has become a byword for war realism. Unlike Oliver Stone, William Wyler, Samuel Fuller and others, Spielberg has never been to war, but his painstaking re-creation of combat, taking advice from Hollywood's foremost combat advisor Captain Dale Dye, left many cinema-goers convinced that the war films they had seen before, (perhaps with the exception of Stone's Platoon), were a lie. Spielberg understood that if he subjected audiences to sustained periods of bloody, disorientating violence, they might have an inkling of some of the unspoken truth of modern combat - that it is a ghastly, brutal world where survival is a lottery and the constant fear of death drives ordinary men to shoot enemy soldiers while they are surrendering and then laugh about it. It is a fitting tribute to war veterans, illustrating not just what they went through for future generations, but raising equally valid questions about how they can hang on to jobs and relationships afterwards, let alone their own humanity and sanity.

Waterloo (1970): The Charge of The Cuirassiers

There will probably never be a more faithful recreation of a Napoleonic battle - or any battle involving massed ranks of foot soldiers and cavalry - without the aid of digital effects. Watching Waterloo is a truly breathtaking experience because you know that every man and horse you are looking at is real. Faced with the task of recreating the battle, (including its climax, a massed charge of the French cavalry against the squares of Scots Guards), legendary producer Dino De Laurentiis and director Sergei Bondarchuk turned to The Red Army, who loaned 20,000 foot soldiers and Kazak horsemen for the battle. During the charge, many horses were killed or had to be put down.