You know that a genre is overdone when spoofs are made of them, as is the case with all three of the trends mentioned above. Scary Movie made fun of the horror and ghost story genres, while Not Another Teen Movie made fun of the teen romantic comedy genre. So now I wonder, when will they come out with a spoof of war movies? We certainly have had our share of war movies over the last year, as there should be enough material to spoof. Of course there have been spoofs made of war movies before (like Top Secret and Hot Shots).

But my point in this article is not to talk about spoofs but rather about why war movies have attacked theaters, and to try to figure out what makes one war movie different from another. In the last five or six weeks alone there have been no fewer than three war movies that have graced the big screen (Black Hawk Down in January, Hart's War in February and We Were Soldiers out in theaters now). Last year there were three war movies (Enemy at the Gates, Pearl Harbor and Behind Enemy Lines).

Where did this all start? Probably with Steven Spielberg's classic, Saving Private Ryan. There have always been war movies but lately there's a renewed interest from Hollywood. And now with the success of Pearl Harbor, Behind Enemy Lines, Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers, the trend may not be over.

When Saving Private Ryan hit the screens back in 1998, it was the talk of the movie industry and everyone that saw it. It set a new standard for war movies; the opening thirty minutes alone was enough to make it an instant classic; never has war been shown so graphically. It was enough to make some people sick to the stomach and veterans have flashbacks. Some praised it as not only the best picture of the year but one of the best of all time (strangely enough it didn't win Best Picture at the Oscars? But it will in the future be remembered more than the Oscar winner, Shakespeare in Love).  And along with it, the movie set a new trend in Hollywood...war movies were the "in" thing again.

Someone asked me if the events on 9/11 had anything to do with the barrage of new war movies, but as you probably know all movies were already either in production or at least in pre-production. While some movies were delayed because of 9/11, Behind Enemy Lines was pushed forward and released way ahead of schedule.

So, with all these war movies what makes one different from the other, other than the obvious of there being different actors and directors involved? Strangely enough, four of the six movies over the last year had something that Saving Private Ryan didn't. They were based on true events, Ryan not. Well, the opening scene in Ryan was based on the truth but not the rest of the film.  Enemy at the Gates, Pearl Harbor, Black Hawk Down and We Were Soldiers are all based on true events. Behind Enemy Lines and Hart's War are not.

Three of the movies (Hart's War, Pearl Harbor and Enemy at the Gates) took place during World War II. Harbor and Gates dealt with different actual events while Hart's War was a fictional story about American POW's in Germany. Black Hawk Down took place during the conflict in Somalia, We Were Soldiers depicted the USA's first major battle in Vietnam and Behind Enemy Lines takes place somewhere in Europe.

As I sat and watched We Were Soldiers last weekend, I couldn't help but feel that I have seen this all before. Violent battle scenes, one after another. You get to know the characters and care about them and then you sit on the edge of your seat hoping that they will survive. And it never fails in war movies: there is always someone that dies that makes you sad. Watching the first twenty minutes or so of a war movie you can usually figure out who will die during it; they set it up where you care about this person and then bam, the person dies. How can these movies continue to do well at the box office, if most of them pretty much has the same content?

Well, one important factor is the storyline. If it has a good story to tell the action should just become kind of a backdrop. I know, Pearl Harbor made almost $200 million and most people didn't like the love story. But the whole feeling of that movie was that it was an event picture and that everyone already knew the story, so the filmmakers just somehow had to make it to the battle sequences. And was that amazing to watch or what?

The rest of the war movies over the last year all had stories that audiences were unfamiliar with.  That is one thing that sets them apart. How many people really knew the story behind We Were Soldiers? Or what about Enemy at the Gates? I didn't know much about the story behind Black Hawk Down either but I know that some people have read the book.

But when you get right down to it, all war movies deal with is good versus bad. There is usually tons of violence and action. Some of your favorite characters are going to die and the side you're rooting for usually wins in the end. They all have different stories but somehow they still have a similar look and feel to them. Still, these war films make good money at the box office.

I have seen five of the six war movies (the only one I didn't see was Enemy at the Gates) and I enjoyed every single one of them. So I guess the trend is working on me at least and I will be at the theater this summer to see the next big war movie, Windtalkers.