When it comes to naming the most popular directors working today, Steven Spielberg is bound to come up. Ever since he pioneered the summer blockbuster with 1975’s Jaws, Spielberg has been one of the most renowned filmmakers in the world. His stories are usually characterized by their treacly sentimentality, tugging on the audience’s heartstrings with a healthy dose of schmaltz.
For the most part, Spielberg’s movies are the unmitigated festivals of sugary sweetness that his most cynical detractors claim they are. But across his decades-long career, Spielberg has directed all kinds of movies, and some of them have been surprisingly dark.
10 Most Sentimental: The Terminal
In by far the most lightweight of his collaborations with Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks stars in The Terminal as a man from the fictional nation of Krakozhia who is stuck in New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport due to a military coup that’s broken out in his native land. He can’t go home and he can’t set foot on American soil.
Despite the interesting political themes in this premise, Spielberg simply focused on making a good-natured, heartwarming romance in which the lead tries to woo a flight attendant played by Catherine Zeta-Jones.
9 Surprisingly Dark: Schindler’s List
During the lengthy post-production process for the VFX-laden Jurassic Park, Spielberg used his downtime to get to work on what is arguably the definitive cinematic portrait of the horrors of the Holocaust. Shot in black-and-white, Schindler’s List was a cultural landmark when it hit theaters in 1993.
Liam Neeson stars as an industrialist who sees what’s going on in Nazi concentration camps and uses his power to save as many Jews from the camps as he can. Ultimately, Schindler saved over 1,000 lives, but all he could think about was the millions of lives he didn’t save.
8 Most Sentimental: War Horse
Based on the Michael Morpurgo novel of the same name and its subsequent stage adaptation, War Horse follows a Thoroughbred horse who is bought by the British Army and passed from owner to owner throughout World War I.
The story is comparable to Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, but where that movie is endlessly depressing (it’s one of the saddest movies ever made), Spielberg’s movie is steadfastly sentimental.
7 Surprisingly Dark: The Color Purple
Anchored by fantastic performances by Whoopi Goldberg, Danny Glover, and Oprah Winfrey, The Color Purple tackles some surprisingly serious subjects for a Spielberg movie, including racism, domestic violence, and pedophilia.
A white man might not have been the best person to tell this story about the struggles faced by African-American women throughout the 20th century, but Goldberg’s performance as Celie is one of the greatest ever committed to film.
6 Most Sentimental: A.I. Artificial Intelligence
Stanley Kubrick initially developed A.I. Artificial Intelligence as a sci-fi take on the Pinocchio story, replacing the puppet that wants to be a real boy with a cyborg who wants to be a real boy. If Kubrick had made the movie, it surely would’ve been a cold, darkly themed tale like 2001 or A Clockwork Orange.
But after Kubrick’s death, Steven Spielberg took over the project. He remained true to Kubrick’s original story treatment, but made it sappy and heartwarming.
5 Surprisingly Dark: Saving Private Ryan
The opening recreation of the D-Day landings in Saving Private Ryan triggered PTSD attacks in veterans who were actually on the beaches. The scene establishes Saving Private Ryan as a visceral, definitive portrait of combat in the Second World War.
Tom Hanks plays Captain Miller, a school teacher unprepared for the realities of war who’s tasked with leading his troops to find a private played by Matt Damon whose brothers have all been killed.
4 Most Sentimental: The BFG
In his adaptation of Roald Dahl’s The BFG starring Mark Rylance all CGI’d up in the title role, Spielberg gutted the darker themes of Dahl’s source material and only kept the saccharin stuff.
It’s hardly a perfect movie, but The BFG is just as heartwarming as one would expect from a Spielberg movie about the friendship that blossoms between a little girl and a wholesome giant.
3 Surprisingly Dark: Indiana Jones And The Temple Of Doom
After harking back to the old pulpy adventure serials of the ‘30s with Raiders of the Lost Ark, Spielberg took a leaf out of the Star Wars playbook with the follow-up, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and went much darker.
Indy stumbles upon an underground cult that ritualistically sacrifices people by locking them in a cage, ripping out their heart, and lowering them into a pit of fire. It was a drastic change of pace for the franchise.
2 Most Sentimental: E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial
Easily Spielberg’s most sentimental movie is E.T., in which a lonely kid who gets neglected by his family and bullied by his classmates finds a kindred spirit in an adorable alien who was left behind on Earth when his fellow visitors got scared off by the cops.
The story instantly connected with audiences, who bought so many tickets that E.T. blew Star Wars out of the water to become the highest-grossing film of all time, a record it held until Spielberg himself broke it again with 1993’s Jurassic Park.
1 Surprisingly Dark: Munich
Nominated for five Oscars and considered to be one of the greatest movies of the 21st century, Munich is Steven Spielberg’s dramatization of Operation Wrath of God, the Israeli government’s retaliation to the massacre perpetrated by Palestinian Black September terrorists at the 1972 Summer Olympics.
Engulfed in controversy for its political stance, Munich is arguably Spielberg’s most challenging film.
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