Kajaki
Band of Brothers (tv series but still great)
Unbroken
Saving Private Ryan
Black Hawk Down
American Sniper
Cockleshell Heroes
The fact that you can even suggest that Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down and American Sniper are the best war films ever – is hilarious. Private Ryan was a massive load of bollocks.
The Thin Red Line may have had it’s issue and was too meandering much of the time – but at least that was based on the actual experience of someone that was there. It was far too big a task to try and transpose the book to film – but at least Malick gave it a shot.
Let me quote Wiki on the book
Kirkus Reviews praised the novel in 1962, commenting that the novel’s “well-drawn battle narrative provides take-off points for dozens of character studies, and the author describes emotional responses to battle, fear, death, homosexuality, along with detached, ironic comments on army organization and the workings of fate, luck and circumstance”.[3]
Paul Christle, speaking at a 20th-century literature conference in 2002, said of the novel, “The Thin Red Line is the only novel of Jones’s war quartet that actually deals with combat, and it pulls no punches in its treatment. Reviewers, critics and scholars have lauded it for its realism. Some, myself included, would place the novel in the domain of literary naturalism because the destinies of Jones’s soldiers are determined by chance and by social, economic, psychological, and political forces beyond their control and, sometimes, even beyond their recognition”.[4]
British historian and military writer John Keegan nominated The Thin Red Line as, in his opinion, one of only two novels portraying Second World War combat that could be favorably compared to the best of the literature to arise from the First World War (the other was Flesh Wounds (1966) by British writer David Holbrook).[5]
That might explain to you, why The Thin Red Line – didn’t attempt to be patriotic guff like most of the movies you just quoted.
