Best Military Movies and Shows on Netflix August 2023

If you’re looking for the best military movies and shows on Netflix this August, we’re here to save you from another long night of scrolling through menu tiles while your dinner slowly becomes tomorrow’s breakfast.

Netflix has a lot to watch, which sounds useful until the algorithm turns your search for Navy SEALs into a reality series about attractive people selling beachfront property. This list should help narrow the field.

Several of these movies and shows are new to Netflix in August, including all seven seasons of SEAL Team, a new Indian Air Force drama and a few familiar military thrillers. The rest are already streaming and worth adding to the queue, whether you’re looking for World War II espionage, the Iraq War, the hunt for Osama bin Laden or an animated infantry unit fighting across Europe.

There should be enough here to keep most military movie fans occupied until September.

‘SEAL Team’

Arrives Aug. 18

David Boreanaz stars as Jason Hayes, leader of Bravo Team, in this long-running drama about an elite unit of Navy SEALs balancing dangerous missions overseas with complicated lives back home.

Netflix is adding all seven seasons at once, which turns SEAL Team into the month’s biggest military binge by a considerable margin. The series began on CBS in 2017 before moving to Paramount+, where it ended in 2024.

The show built a loyal military audience by paying attention to the cost of repeated deployments, combat injuries and the difficulty of returning home when part of you never really left the mission. Veterans also worked on the production as actors, writers and advisers. Once the entire series hits Netflix, viewers can follow Bravo Team from its earliest deployments through its final mission without needing to conduct their own streaming-service scavenger hunt.

‘Operation Safed Sagar: The Highest Air Force Mission’

Arrives Aug. 7

Operation Safed Sagar follows the Golden Arrows squadron of the Indian Air Force during the 1999 Kargil War between India and Pakistan.

The series stars Siddharth, Jimmy Shergill and Abhay Verma as pilots pushed into a dangerous high-altitude mission behind enemy lines. It is based on the real Indian air campaign conducted in support of ground forces fighting in the mountains of Kashmir.

American audiences do not get many military dramas about the Kargil War, and fewer still focus on the pilots tasked with operating in some of the most unforgiving combat terrain on Earth. That alone makes this one worth watching when it arrives.

‘Tears of the Sun’

Arrives Aug. 1

Bruce Willis plays Navy SEAL Lt. A.K. Waters, whose team is sent into Nigeria to evacuate an American doctor during a military coup.

The mission becomes considerably more difficult when the doctor, played by Monica Bellucci, refuses to leave without the refugees under her care. Waters must decide whether to follow his extraction orders or lead the civilians through hostile territory.

Director Antoine Fuqua does not make quiet action movies, and Tears of the Sun gives him jungle patrols, gunfights and Bruce Willis staring into the middle distance beneath a boonie hat. Former Navy SEAL Harry Humphries served as a military technical adviser, although nobody should mistake the result for a documentary about evacuation procedures.

‘Zero Dark Thirty’

Arrives Aug. 1

Jessica Chastain stars as a CIA intelligence analyst consumed by the search for Osama bin Laden in director Kathryn Bigelow’s 2012 thriller.

The movie follows the decade-long hunt from the aftermath of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks through the intelligence work that eventually leads U.S. forces to bin Laden’s compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan. Its final stretch dramatizes the 2011 raid by members of SEAL Team 6.

Zero Dark Thirty spends much of its running time in offices, interrogation rooms and secure facilities, but the slow accumulation of intelligence gives the final raid its weight. By the time the helicopters lift off, the audience understands how many years of work are riding inside them.

‘Mile 22’

Arrives Aug. 1

Mark Wahlberg leads a covert CIA paramilitary unit ordered to escort an intelligence asset through a hostile city to an extraction point 22 miles away.

The 2018 action movie also stars Lauren Cohan, John Malkovich, Ronda Rousey and Indonesian martial arts star Iko Uwais, who spends much of the film reminding everyone else that they probably should not have allowed him within kicking distance.

Mile 22 is more intelligence thriller than traditional war movie, but it sits comfortably beside Netflix’s special operations titles. It is loud, frantic and edited with the patience of someone who has just consumed a military-sized crate of energy drinks.

‘Child’s Play 3’

Arrives Aug. 1

Yes, this is technically a military-school movie. No, Chucky does not respect the chain of command.

The third Child’s Play film finds teenager Andy Barclay enrolled at Kent Military School eight years after his first encounter with the killer doll. Chucky soon tracks him down, finds a new child to terrorize and begins carving his way through the cadet corps.

This is easily the loosest military selection on the list, but the setting gives the movie uniforms, formations, war games and possibly the worst safety briefing in military-school history. It also offers an answer to a question nobody thought to ask: How well would a possessed children’s toy perform during field training?

‘The Six Triple Eight’

Kerry Washington stars in this historical drama about the 6888th Central Postal Directory Battalion, the only predominantly Black Women’s Army Corps unit sent overseas during World War II.

The battalion arrived in Europe to confront warehouses filled with undelivered letters and packages meant for American service members. The women worked through the backlog while facing segregation, poor facilities and military leaders who underestimated them.

Directed by Tyler Perry, the film turns military mail into the center of a war story. Which may not sound as cinematic as storming a beach, but anyone who has waited weeks for a letter or care package while deployed understands why getting the mail moving mattered.

‘Operation Mincemeat’

In 1943, British intelligence officers developed an unusual plan to convince Germany that Allied forces intended to invade Greece instead of Sicily.

Their secret agent was a dead man.

Operation Mincemeat stars Colin Firth and Matthew Macfadyen as the officers who prepare a corpse with fake military documents and arrange for it to wash ashore in Spain, hoping the information will reach German intelligence.

The operation sounds like the premise of a particularly dark British comedy, but it became one of World War II’s most famous deception campaigns. The film understands that intelligence work sometimes involves codes and clandestine meetings. Other times, it involves inventing an entire life for a dead body and hoping the Nazis read his mail.

‘Mosul’

This Arabic-language war film follows a young Iraqi police officer who joins a rogue unit fighting ISIS through the devastated streets of Mosul.

After the unit saves his life, Kawa, played by Adam Bessa, travels with its exhausted members through a city where every intersection could hold an ambush. Their objective remains unclear to him for much of the mission, and the men are carrying more personal history than ammunition.

Mosul tells the fight from an Iraqi perspective and keeps its attention on people defending their own city. The combat is close, dirty and confusing. Nobody gets to stand on a hill and explain what the war means before the shooting starts again.

‘Sand Castle’

Nicholas Hoult stars as a reluctant American soldier whose platoon is ordered to repair a damaged water pumping station after the 2003 invasion of Iraq.

The assignment sounds straightforward until the soldiers arrive in a village where the residents do not trust them, insurgents are watching and every attempt to repair the system creates another opportunity for someone to get killed.

Henry Cavill, Logan Marshall-Green and Glen Powell round out the cast. Sand Castle works because its mission is so ordinary. The soldiers are not hunting a dictator or rescuing the world. They are trying to make water flow while surviving long enough to see whether anyone notices the difference.

‘The Liberator’

The Liberator is a four-part animated miniseries about a group of soldiers fighting through the European campaign during World War II.

The story follows Capt. Felix Sparks and his men from the fighting at Salerno and Anzio through France and Germany. Bradley James voices Sparks, while Martin Sensmeier, Jose Miguel Vasquez and Forrest Goodluck portray members of his unit.

The animation gives the series an unusual look somewhere between live action and a graphic novel, but the story remains grounded in infantry combat. Four episodes also make it a manageable watch for anyone who wants a complete World War II series without accidentally surrendering an entire weekend to television.

‘Narvik’

This Norwegian World War II drama is set during the 1940 battles for Narvik, an ice-free port that Germany needed to transport iron ore from Sweden.

The film follows a Norwegian soldier who returns home from the fighting and discovers that his wife has been forced to make impossible choices during the German occupation.

Narvik looks beyond the better-known campaigns of World War II and focuses on a battle Netflix describes as Hitler’s first defeat. The movie divides its attention between soldiers fighting in the mountains and civilians trying to survive inside an occupied town. Nobody gets an easy version of the war.

‘Turning Point: 9/11 and the War on Terror’

This five-part documentary series traces the Sept. 11 attacks from al-Qaida’s origins through the wars, intelligence failures and political decisions that followed.

The series uses archival recordings and interviews with survivors, government officials, service members and people affected by the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. It examines the attacks themselves before moving through the U.S. response, secret surveillance, interrogation programs and the long war in Afghanistan.

For veterans of the post-9/11 era, parts of Turning Point may feel less like distant history and more like somebody opening a box that has been sitting in the garage for 20 years. It is a difficult watch, but it gives the month’s action movies some necessary context.