War Movie Trivia
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50 free War Movie trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
49 free war movie trivia questions with answers. This war movie trivia quiz marches through a century of combat cinema: the silent-era and early talkie classics like All Quiet on the Western Front, the WWII epics of the 1950s and 60s (The Bridge on the River Kwai, The Great Escape, The Longest Day, Patton), the Vietnam wave of Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Full Metal Jacket, and the modern era of Saving Private Ryan, Black Hawk Down, The Hurt Locker, Dunkirk, 1917 and the 2022 German remake of All Quiet. Questions cover directors, casts, real people the stories were drawn from, famous scenes, box office and Academy Awards. The early questions suit anyone who has watched a few war films with family on a Sunday afternoon; later ones dig into production stories, source novels and awards records that reward serious film buffs. Every answer was checked against encyclopaedia film entries before publishing, so you can settle arguments with confidence.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Which director made Saving Private Ryan, famous for its Omaha Beach opening sequence?
Steven Spielberg
Steven Spielberg won his second Best Director Oscar for it, yet the film itself lost Best Picture to the romantic comedy Shakespeare in Love.
Q 02In Saving Private Ryan, why is Ryan being sent home?
His three brothers have all been killed
His three brothers have all been killed, a plot drawn from the real Nilands, though one brother presumed dead later turned up alive in a Japanese prison camp in Burma.
Q 03Which Vietnam War film is loosely based on Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness?
Apocalypse Now
Apocalypse Now was planned as a shoot of a few months, but a typhoon wrecked the sets and its star had a heart attack, and filming dragged on for more than a year.
Q 04Which actor arrived on Coppola's Vietnam epic overweight and unprepared to play Colonel Kurtz?
Marlon Brando
Marlon Brando arrived far heavier than the gaunt colonel Coppola had pictured, so the director dressed him in black and filmed little but his face in the dark.
Q 05Who plays the overweight recruit Leonard Lawrence in Full Metal Jacket?
Vincent D'Onofrio
Vincent D'Onofrio won the part with audition tapes he mailed to Kubrick in England, then gained about 70 pounds for it and wrecked a knee on the obstacle course.
Q 06Which real-life former Marine drill instructor plays Gunnery Sergeant Hartman for Stanley Kubrick?
R. Lee Ermey
R. Lee Ermey was hired only as a technical adviser, but Kubrick saw tapes of him improvising insults at extras and gave him the part; about half his dialogue is his own.
Q 07Which actor plays Chris Taylor, the young volunteer at the centre of Oliver Stone's Platoon?
Charlie Sheen
Charlie Sheen's volunteer stands in for Oliver Stone himself, who left Yale, enlisted for Vietnam and was wounded twice there before he wrote the script.
Q 08Which 1978 Vietnam War film shows American prisoners of war forced to play Russian roulette by their captors?
The Deer Hunter
The Deer Hunter won Best Picture, then came under attack: war reporters pointed out that no case of prisoners being forced to play Russian roulette was ever documented.
Q 09Which David Lean film about POWs building a Burma railway crossing won Best Picture for 1957?
The Bridge on the River Kwai
The Bridge on the River Kwai won its screenplay Oscar for a French novelist who could not write English: the real writers were blacklisted and were credited only decades later.
Q 10In The Great Escape, where does Steve McQueen's Hilts keep ending up after his failed escape attempts?
The cooler
The cooler is the camp's solitary block, where Hilts bounces a baseball off the wall so often that the credits bill him as 'The Cooler King'.
Q 11The Great Escape dramatises a mass breakout from which German POW camp?
Stalag Luft III
Stalag Luft III saw 76 men crawl out through the tunnel in March 1944, but only three reached safety, and 50 of those recaptured were shot on Hitler's orders.
Q 12Which 1970 film opens with an American general delivering a speech in front of a giant Stars and Stripes?
Patton
Patton opens with a speech of more than five minutes delivered straight to the audience; it won seven Oscars and became a favourite of President Nixon, who screened it at the White House.
Q 13George C. Scott famously did what after winning the Best Actor Oscar for playing a WWII general?
Refused to accept it
Q 21Black Hawk Down depicts a 1993 US raid in which city?
Mogadishu
Mogadishu: planned as a quick snatch raid, it became an overnight street battle after two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down and crashed in the Somali capital.
Q 22Which German film set aboard a WWII submarine earned six Oscar nominations, including Best Director for Wolfgang Petersen?
Das Boot
Das Boot went home empty-handed: it lost all six of its nominations, three of them to Gandhi, including Best Director.
Q 23Which Mel Gibson film tells the story of Desmond Doss, the unarmed medic who won the Medal of Honor at Okinawa?
Hacksaw Ridge
Hacksaw Ridge was the troops' name for Okinawa's Maeda Escarpment, the cliff down which Doss lowered about 75 wounded men by rope, one at a time.
Refused to accept it: Scott had told the Academy beforehand that he would not take part in a contest between actors, and he stayed away from the ceremony when his name was read out.
Q 14Which German author's novel became the 1930 Best Picture winner All Quiet on the Western Front?
Erich Maria Remarque
Erich Maria Remarque's story enraged the Nazis: at its 1930 Berlin run they let off stink bombs and released mice in the cinema, and within days the government banned the film.
Q 15The 2022 German-language film version of All Quiet on the Western Front was released mainly on which platform?
Netflix
Netflix got the film only after co-writer Lesley Paterson, a champion triathlete, spent 16 years using her race winnings to keep renewing her option on the novel's film rights.
Q 16Christopher Nolan's Dunkirk weaves together three timelines set in which three places?
Land, sea, air
Land, sea, air: the beach story covers a week, the boat crossing a day and the dogfight an hour, because Nolan matched each clock to reality and a Spitfire carried about an hour of fuel.
Q 17Which pop star made his feature film debut as a soldier in Dunkirk?
Harry Styles
Harry Styles auditioned against thousands of young actors, and Christopher Nolan has said he did not realise quite how famous the One Direction singer was when he cast him.
Q 18Sam Mendes's 1917 is edited to look like what?
One continuous shot
One continuous shot is the trick: long takes were stitched together invisibly, with a single obvious break when the hero is knocked out and the screen goes black. It won Roger Deakins an Oscar.
Q 191917 was partly inspired by stories told to Sam Mendes by whom?
His grandfather
His grandfather, Alfred Mendes, carried messages for the British on the Western Front and told the stories to his grandson decades later; the film is dedicated to him.
Q 20Which Best Picture-winning film about a bomb-disposal team in Iraq was directed by Kathryn Bigelow?
The Hurt Locker
The Hurt Locker made Kathryn Bigelow the first woman to win Best Director, and it beat Avatar, made by her former husband James Cameron, who sat right behind her at the ceremony.
Q 24In Inglourious Basterds, what is the name of the SS colonel played by Christoph Waltz?
Hans Landa
Hans Landa almost sank the film: Tarantino feared he had written an unplayable part and was days from calling the shoot off when Christoph Waltz auditioned.
Q 25Which Kathryn Bigelow film about the hunt for Osama bin Laden was shot under the working title For God and Country?
Zero Dark Thirty
Zero Dark Thirty is, in Bigelow's words, a military term for thirty minutes after midnight, chosen for the darkness and secrecy of the ten-year hunt.
Q 26American Sniper is based on the memoir of which Navy SEAL?
Chris Kyle
Chris Kyle survived four tours in Iraq, then was shot dead at a Texas gun range in 2013 by a troubled veteran he was trying to help, the year before filming began.
Q 27Which Terrence Malick film about Guadalcanal came out the same year as Saving Private Ryan?
The Thin Red Line
The Thin Red Line ended Malick's twenty-year break from directing and earned seven Oscar nominations, but it won none, while the year's other Second World War epic took five.
Q 28Letters from Iwo Jima is told almost entirely from whose perspective?
Japanese soldiers
Japanese soldiers: Clint Eastwood made it as a companion to Flags of Our Fathers, which shows the same battle from the American side, and he shot the two films back to back.
Q 29Which Best Picture winner starred Peter O'Toole as a British officer leading a desert revolt against the Ottomans?
Lawrence of Arabia
Lawrence of Arabia won seven Oscars, Best Picture among them, yet Peter O'Toole lost Best Actor to Gregory Peck: the first of eight nominations that never brought him a competitive win.
Q 30Which Mel Gibson film about Australian troops in WWI was directed by Peter Weir?
Gallipoli
Gallipoli ends at the Nek, where on 7 August 1915 Australian light horsemen charged Turkish trenches on foot in four waves; 372 of the 600 were killed or wounded in under an hour.