12 Best Navy SEAL Movies, Ranked

Members of the armed services can and will argue amongst themselves, but in the minds of people and pop culture, Navy SEALs loom large as the picture of the United States’ most elite military men. We can probably thank the fiction of Tom Clancy, and the fact that a SEAL team that killed 9-11 mastermind Osama bin Laden, but Hollywood has been enamored with the special operations force for at least the last three decades. When a character in any movie is declared to be either a current or former Navy SEAL, it’s a given that they won’t go down easily. When we discuss the most ruthless thing a U.S. president can do short of a nuclear strike, more often than not it’s, “Send in SEAL Team 6!”

While movies often take artistic license, it’s fair to say that some of the movies featuring Navy SEALs are significantly more accurate than others, just as some are more positive portrayals than others. All, however, have a place on this list of the best films to feature SEALs. They’re often the heroes, but they can be the villains too, because very little is scarier as a threat than an elite hero gone bad. Regardless of the different tacks they take, all the movies on this list are worth your time, though for very different reasons.

These are the 12 best Navy SEAL movies. 

Loosely based on the exploits of retired SEAL Chuck Pfarrer, “Navy SEALs” was initially intended for director Ridley Scott, but it went to Richard Marquand (“Return of the Jedi”), who died and was replaced by Lewis Teague (“The Jewel of the Nile”). Teague had issues with the script and the producers, wanting to make an edgier movie than “Top Gun,” with an ending that seemed to celebrate the terrorist villains. Rewritten almost constantly during shooting, the final film displays the identity crisis of a movie that at once wants to be over-the-top action and a serious military procedural. In a particularly odd decision, the movie poorly pays tribute to the beach volleyball scene from “Top Gun” by having the team drunkenly play golf. 

Nonetheless, there’s plenty of fun to be had watching Charlie Sheen high on, well, let’s be generous and say “adrenaline.” A post-‘Terminator” Michael Biehn nearly steals the movie from his wilder friend, Dennis Haysbert plays their best pal, Joanne Whalley-Kilmer is a journalist who helps the SEALs, and best of all, Bill Paxton glues on a transparently fake mustache to play a sniper named “God.” The film assumes viewers have never heard of the Navy SEALs before, with opening text explaining who they are.

As the country moved away from Reagan-era militarism and towards George Bush’s “kinder, gentler nation” in 1990, the movie was killed by timing. Still, in the years since, many SEALs have cited the movie as an inspiration to enlist.

Steven Seagal garnered some of the rare positive reviews of his career as former SEAL Casey Ryback, demoted to the role of cook for insubordination just as terrorists take over the ship on which he’s stationed. Tommy Lee Jones, as the main CIA turncoat villain disguised as a musician is at his hammy best, with Gary Busey as his equally evil sidekick. In Seagal’s corner is Playboy Playmate Erika Eleniak, who gets her obligatory nudity out of the way early so she can spend the rest of the movie actually developing as a character. The supporting cast is loaded with great character actors like Colm Meaney, Bernie Casey, Glenn Morshower, and Kane Hodder.

Director Andrew Davis pointedly tried to make the movie that would turn Seagal from a B-action star into an A-list leading man, and he succeeded at least for one movie. Seagal had previously attempted to broaden his range by going on “Saturday Night Live,” for an episode the cast hated doing so much that it isn’t even available in rerun streaming (Lorne Michaels called him the biggest jerk in “SNL” history). Davis, on the other hand, got “The Fugitive” as a result of his evident directorial skill with a limited lead.

For a brief moment, though, Seagal was respectable, and skilled enough in martial arts that he looked like an unstoppable killing machine onscreen. 

Bruce Willis is at his John Wayne-iest in this action drama that simultaneously embraces and interrogates the white Western savior trope. As SEAL team leader Waters, Willis goes into Nigeria initially just to save four aid workers, before suffering a low-key crisis of conscience and deciding the local refugees should come to safety as well.

Director Antoine Fuqua disagreed with Willis about the focus of the film — the star wanted a successful action movie, while the director wanted to make a point about conditions in Africa. The former clearly won out, as none of the indigenous characters even register as fully developed. However, the movie succeeds in portraying the SEAL perspective — it may seem like it’s trying to stay emotionally detached and focused on the supposed heroes, but then it piles on the atrocities until even the most stone-cold killers on our side can’t turn away. 

The end product may not be escapist enough for action fans, nor sufficiently realistic for those with real-world concerns, yet in merely attempting to display the moral compromises everyone in a war zone must deal with, it lets viewers into a headspace not often empathized with by a major studio.

When you watch “Lone Survivor,” it becomes entirely clear that Mark Wahlberg was meant to work with Mel Gibson one day. As bodies get ripped open by bullets in slow motion, the SEAL team take a beating like Jesus in “The Passion of the Christ,” with a very Catholic heroism of suffering and martyrdom placed front and center. The title arguably “spoils” the ending, though it’s based on true events anyway — the viewer already knows Wahlberg’s Marcus Luttrell will survive, and his teammates will not. From there, it’s just a matter of how much he’ll have to endure before he can make it to safety. Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, and Ben Foster costar as his doomed compadres.

Based on an unsuccessful real-life military operation to catch a Taliban leader, as recounted in Luttrell’s nonfiction book of the same name, the movie never lets you relax in the knowledge that the onscreen Luttrell will be fine. Rather, it wants you to make you feel the pain he had to sustain in the name of ostensibly protecting you. It’s not exactly family viewing, but director Peter Berg kept it authentic by giving real Nay SEALs “free reign” on set to point out problems or call “cut” on anything they felt wasn’t legit.

“Lone Survivor” became the first of an unofficial trilogy of real-life-based action dramas directed by Berg and starring Wahlberg, followed by “Deepwater Horizon” and “Patriot’s Day.”

Generally less highly rated than its predecessor, probably due to the lack of Tommy Lee Jones, “Under Siege 2” is actually the better “Die Hard” ripoff, with Steven Seagal’s Casey Ryback stuck on a speeding train full of terrorists who have his daughter, Sarah (a teenage Katherine Heigl). Co-written by Matt Reeves and directed by Geoff Murphy (“The Quiet Earth”), it casts monologuist Eric Bogosian against type as a mad genius cyber-terrorist, with Everett McGill (“Twin Peaks”) as his main muscle, memorably licking pepper spray off his own face in one scene.

Seagal rarely allowed himself to be seen losing a fight in movies, but he does allow McGill to get a few decent hits in before dispatching him. The supporting cast this time includes Morris Chestnut, Peter Greene and Kurtwood Smith. By most accounts, Seagal was starting to throw his weight and ego around in unpleasant ways on set, so even though the movie was a relative success, it was also the final “Under Siege,” with director Murphy believing the film was salvaged primarily in the editing room.

Navy SEALs today may look at the current iteration of Seagal and want nothing to do with the guy. But for a few years in the ’90s, he delivered two solid actioners that made the phrase “former SEAL” synonymous with “absolute badass.”

In recent years, “G.I. Jane” has become best known as the butt of Chris Rock’s joke about Jada Pinkett’s lack of hair, as compared to Demi Moore’s buzz cut in the movie. Yet there’s nothing shameful about being compared to G.I. Jane’s lead character, Jordan O’Neil (Moore): she’s a butt-kicker who can hang with the best of them, and the (fictional) first female Navy SEAL. In actuality, there are still no female Navy SEALs, though in 2021, a female sailor completed the 37-week training course to become one of their boat operators for the first time. Maybe it actually is time for a “G.I. Jane 2.”

It’d be easy to mistake this for the work of Sir Ridley Scott’s late, more action-oriented brother Tony. Ridley tends to prefer grander world-building, while Tony was all about hard-hitting action and one-liners. Perhaps stung by having “Alien” upstaged by James Cameron’s “Aliens,” Scott turns Demi into his version of “Rambolina,” as some critics had dubbed Sigourney Weaver’s Ripley. Jordan, and Moore with her, undergoes physical transformation into the perfect warrior, and like Rambo in “First Blood Part II,” must reckon with the fact that she has also been set up to fail. She succeeds anyway — the film may be fictionalized, but it’s not about to let Jordan, or the SEALs, down.

Tom Hanks nearly always plays good guys, but rarely are they tested as much as Captain Phillips. Playing real-life merchant mariner Richard Phillips, he encounters Somali pirates led by the ruthless Abduwali Muse (Barkhad Abdi), who hijack his ship. Thanks to smart thinking and crew teamwork, Phillips’ men capture Muse, but the pirates refuse to leave unless they can take Phillips hostage. Would a Tom Hanks character do anything but nobly volunteer for such a thankless, life-threatening? But of course.

Everyone remembers Muse yelling that he’s the captain now; Abdi was Oscar-nominated for his performance, a part he had won as the result of a massive talent search. Less remembered is that Phillips is saved by Seal Team 6, a.k.a. DEVGRU, whose marksmen take out Phillips’ captors just as it seems he’s exhausted every last trick to stay alive. Max Martini, who previously worked with Hanks in “Saving Private Ryan,” plays the team’s commander. As the movie ends, repeated assurances of safety from the Navy provide Phillips with the comfort and reassurance that Hanks’ presence in a movie often similarly gives viewers.

Paul Greengrass, best known for three of the “Jason Bourne” movies, directed in his signature shaky-cam, kinetic style, and it’s truly effective here.

Online nitpickers became excessively obsessed with a doll used as a stand-in for a baby in one scene, as well as the fact that some details of the movie may not have been 100% truthful to the actual life of Navy SEAL sniper Chris Kyle. But dramatic movies are not documentaries, real babies sometimes get sick or don’t show up to set, and one may as well nitpick that Cooper is better looking than Kyle too. Although Clint Eastwood is famous in part for playing conservative heroes like Dirty Harry, and is a known Republican, he doesn’t make propaganda films; on the whole, he does unsentimental character studies.

Taking Kyle’s point of view may make the Iraq war sequences seem oversimplified, but the aftermath is the point. Even a veteran who absolutely believes he was the good guy killing bad guys in his war will suffer emotional fallout, both on himself and his family. Regardless of whether or not one agrees with Kyle, it’s the dichotomy of being skilled in combat and not-so-skilled at dealing with what comes after that “American Sniper” is truly invested in. You don’t have to like the sniper to empathize with his hurt, and his desire to help.

At least some Academy voters agreed, giving it six award nominations, though its only win would be for sound editing. Its box office was more impressive, as “American Sniper” became the biggest January movie ever. 

After the second live-action Transformers film, “Revenge of the Fallen,” received fan and critical backlash over its broadly stereotypical humor and clearly rushed screenplay (the cast and crew knew there were problems), director Michael Bay went pointedly darker with the third and added 3D. He still couldn’t win over many critics, but the fans came back, even if Megan Fox didn’t. The final film in the franchise to star Shia LaBeouf also recruited Kelsey Grammer and Patrick Dempsey to play the human villains, Frances McDormand as a no-nonsense Director of National Intelligence, and longtime Transformers fan Leonard Nimoy as the turncoat robot villain Sentinel Prime.

“Dark of the Moon” largely puts the actual transformation aspects of the robots on the back burner, as the major new Decepticon foes, Shockwave and Driller, never even display alt-modes. In the film’s major action setpiece, humans attempt to enter a Chicago that has been taken over by hostile robots, causing the usually moral Autobot leader Optimus Prime to snap and declare that he wants to kill every last one of them.

The “Transformers” movies typically represent U.S. military power with the fictitious division codenamed N.E.S.T. In the Battle of Chicago, however, they’re backed up by Navy SEALs, because against hundreds of Decepticons, who also have their own air force of non-sentient flying vehicles, a group as small and secretive as N.E.S.T. need the best backup they can get. Bay, who never met a military force he didn’t adore and/or fetishize, makes them shine.

Before Dwayne Johnson became world-famous, “The Rock” that cast the biggest shadow over Hollywood was Michael Bay’s second feature, and the movie that crystallized his style as quick-cutting, explosion-loving, dirty-joke telling adrenaline junkie catnip. It also undoubtedly sparked debates in military circles for years, as it pitted Navy SEALs against Marines gone rogue. SEALs might argue that to make the match-up more fair, the SEALs have to put up with reluctant SAS veteran Mason (Sean Connery), and noncombatant scientist Goodspeed (Nicolas Cage). However, they also once again have Michael Biehn leading the team, here going by the name of Commander Anderson. Collectively they must take back Alcatraz from General Francis Xavier Hummel (Ed Harris), who has hijacked it as a launch site for his purloined chemical weapons.

The SEALs do not survive their mission, but the Marines ultimately get taken out by Nicolas Cage and Sean Connery. So who really wins? The audience. “Bayhem,” as we now call it, may fetishize the military, but it’s hardly a realistic depiction of the battlefield; rather, it’s an operatic display of the best work that pyros, squibs, and quipping actors in uniform can deliver.

In an ironic twist, false reports of Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein’s weapons of mass destruction turned out to be based on the way chemical weapons were cinematically depicted by Bay in “The Rock.”

Kathryn Bigelow followed up her Oscar-winning “The Hurt Locker,” an unflinching look at a bomb disposal unit, with “Zero Dark Thirty,” the story behind the story of how SEAL Team Six carried out the raid that killed Osama bin Laden. When they finally do the deed, it’s so abrupt and sudden that it takes the viewer a moment to realize it even happened, because Bigelow is dedicated to making it feel real rather than cinematic. Most of the story, however, follows CIA analyst Maya (Jessica Chastain) a fictional composite character assigned to find bin Laden before the SEALs can be sent in. Joel Edgerton plays the leader of SEAL Team 6, with backup that includes pre-Marvel turns by Chris Pratt, Frank Grillo, and Mike Colter.

While it was critically praised upon release, “Zero Dark Thirty” sustained bipartisan rebukes for its depiction of torture by the CIA. In the film, a key suspect gets waterboarded and does not break, but feeding him well later is depicted as yielding better info. On the one hand, that could be read as torture not working, while humane treatment does; on the other, it could also be seen as endorsing abuse as the necessary part of a good cop, bad cop routine. Or did the CIA feed the filmmakers misinformation? Here’s the “Zero Dark Thirty” controversy, explained. Either way, it’s hard to deny this is a great Navy SEALs movie.

In many ways the ultimate James Cameron movie, “The Abyss,” at least in its preferred Special Edition director’s cut, combines all the director’s obsessions: underwater exploration, nuclear war, iridescent aliens, militarism vs. science, a love story that may determine the fate of the world, and CG characters (before they were even a thing!). 

When a U.S. nuclear submarine encounters something unexpected and sinks to the bottom of the ocean, the military sends a SEAL team down to an underwater diving platform to try to retrieve what they can. When a storm cuts off communication to the surface, and a global crisis escalates, mining foreman Bud (Ed Harris) and his estranged scientist wife Lindsay (Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio) butt heads with SEAL team leader Coffey (Michael Biehn, again!) as to their next course of action. Then the aliens show up.

Coffey, suffering from a pressure-related nervous disorder, promptly decides to nuke the aliens and effectively makes him the film’s antagonist. Despite Cameron’s anti-violence inclinations, however, it’s never as simple as “military bad, scientists good.” After Coffey’s suicidal course of action kills him, the rest of his team help Bud learn to breathe oxygenated fluid, so he can get deep enough to disarm the stolen warhead. Once there, his willingness to self-sacrifice convinces the aliens not to destroy humanity (or, in the theatrical cut, simply serves as a “we come in peace”-style introduction).