Cinema returns to the same conflicts time and again. For the generations born after the Second World War, the popular image of history’s greatest battles come from the big screen: the harsh conditions and futility of the trenches in the First World War (Gallipoli, All Quiet on the Western Front); the sheer scale and barbarity of D-Day (Saving Private Ryan, The Longest Day); the paranoia and psychological torture of jungle warfare in Vietnam (Apocalypse Now, Platoon).
Iraq and Afghanistan got a couple of decent films (Three Kings, Jarhead, Lone Survivor) and it’s easy to imagine that a cynical Hollywood executive has a film already in the works about Ukraine, with some hunk in mind to play Zelenskyy. But 40 years since the Falklands War began, the British-Argentine conflict still hasn’t been the subject of a major movie.
The Falklands feels as much a part of the fabric of Britain in the Eighties as Vietnam does to America in the Sixties. So what has prevented the Falklands from being dramatised as a major movie production? Is the topic still too sensitive a topic for us Brits (and indeed, the Argentines)? Are its politics more complex than the old Allies vs. Axis dynamic that makes WW2 such a translatable narrative? Or is it, for whatever reason, just not cinematic enough to compete with the rousing courage of Private Ryan et al? There is, after all, something universally human at the heart of war cinema.
“The story of young men going to war and discovering they can be killed and questioning if it was worth it, that’s a perennial story,” says Sir Richard Eyre, director of 1988 BBC drama Tumbledown – the last significant film to be made on the Falklands. “That’s a story that will go on being told. But the politics of it are quite complicated, I think, from this distance.”
The conflict began on April 2, 1982 when Argentina’s new Junta, headed by General Leopoldo Galtieri, sent 130 Argentine commandos to invade the Falklands Islands, following years of political tussling over sovereignty of the islands. The fighting lasted for 10 weeks, after British troops had seized back the islands and forced the Argentines to surrender. Almost a thousand lives had been lost: 649 Argentine military personnel, 255 British military personnel, and three Falkland Islanders killed.
