Military movies

Ten-hut! Showmax is adding real-life military action to your streaming with intense movies.

- CRAIG FALCK

Here are your marching orders straight to streaming service Showmax to enjoy biographical military movies that involve the United States army and its wars on everything from terror to dictators. And the scary thing – whether it’s soldiers fighting for their lives or the powers that be being exposed for ignorance – is that everything you’re seeing is real!

THE OUTPOST (2020)

Combat Outpost Keating is the setting for this biographical war drama. It’s on the northern Afghanistan border in a remote village at the base of a mountain range… and more importantly, it makes the US troops stationed there sitting ducks. It’s set in 2006 during Operation Enduring Freedom, an engagement between 55 US soldiers and 400 armed enemies. The fight – dubbed Battle Of Kamdesh – sees the soldiers willing to die for their country, fighting in the name of freedom; likewise, the enemies are willing to die for what they believe in – the holy war. There’s a lot of shouting, a lot of shooting and a lot of blood – but that’s exactly what’s expected because it’s re-living a literal gunfight to the death as the forces engage each other and unload magazine upon magazine of ammunition into each other. It’s based on journalist Jake Tapper’s 2012 non-fiction novel The Outpost: An Untold Story Of American Valor and stars Scott Eastwood (Lambert in sci-fimovie Pacific Rim: Uprising, 2018) and Orlando Bloom (Legolas in the Lord Of The Rings film trilogy, 2001-2003) as Staff Sergeant Romesha and Captain Benjamin D Keating.

A number of the soldiers are played by actual survivors from the Battle Of Kamdesh, and the real Romesha called the base “like being in a fishbowl”.