It’s a reality of modern war films — or, at least, the good ones — that they tend to be horrifying and exciting at the same time. You could say that’s a contradiction that grows out of the kinetic, larger-than-life nature of the movie medium. Or you could say it’s a truth that expresses something fundamental about war: that the very reason war persists, for all its terror and destruction and death, is that there’s something in human nature that is drawn to war. This is what the movies do for us. Once again, though, I’m speaking of the good ones. There is no better example than “Saving Private Ryan.”I have not seen a war movie more thrilling than this, nor has it made me more aware of the blood-spurting horror and devastation that war can cause.
In contrast, the German version of “All Quiet on the Western Front” feels like an experience that’s been stripped to the bone — morally, spiritually, and dramatically. Based on the 1928 novel by Erich Maria Remarque, it’s not a movie that tries to turn the infamous meat-grinder horror of the trench warfare of World War I into some sort of “spectacle,” the way that Sam Mendes’ video-game apocalypse “1917” did. The film’s hero, Paul Bäumer (Felix Kammerer), is a student who, three years into the war, enlists in the Imperial German Army to fight for the fatherland. He is soon sent to Western Front, where millions of soldiers have already died in a homicidal grass war.
The land was occupied throughout the war. “capture”The Western Front had a very poor frontline. It never moved more than half a mile. So why did so many soldiers die? For no reason. Because of a tragic — one could say obscene — historical accident: that in WWI, the means of fighting was caught between an older, “classical”Mode of stationary combat and technology’s new reality of long distance slaughter. 17 million men were trapped between these cracks by the end of World War II.
Version from 1930 Hollywood “All Quiet on the Western Front,”It was directed by Lewis Milestone and is widely regarded an antiwar landmark. But, of course, if you watch it now, the war scenes won’t make an audience shudder the way they did a century ago. The standard for terror and carnage has been raised to a new level. Edward Berger is the director of the new “All Quiet,” stages his war scenes in what’s become the standard existential bombs-bursting-in-earth, debris-flying-everywhere, war-is-hell-because-its-violence-is-so-random mode of pitiless annihilation. He does it competently, but not better than that; he doesn’t begin to touch the level of imagination that has gripped us in the war cinema of Spielberg, Kubrick, Coppola, Stone, Klimov. Popping out of the trenches, Paul and his fellow soldiers are confronted by a merciless hail of bullets, they’re dunked face down in the mud, they’re shot in the guts or in the head, they’re attacked with bayonets and machetes.
Paul, a gentle, pale-hearted soldier whose uniform was taken from the corpse of a fallen soldier, somehow fights on and carries on. He strikes us as a mild young man, yet there’s a ruthless killer inside him. Whirling to shoot one soldier, then knife another, he becomes, in essence, a desperate action hero, and I put it that way only because I didn’t find his acumen on the battlefield especially convincing. Berger wants to be a filmmaker. “close”To war, but the horror inside “All Quiet on the Western Front”It is both very visible and tidy in its presentation. Maybe that’s why it feels numbing.
The great war films aren’t reticent about mixing personal drama into the combat. They have characters as defined and sharp as their theater of violence. The new is different. “All Quiet on the Western Front” is two and a half hours of dramatic minimalism, as if this were somehow a measure of the film’s integrity. The soldiers, including Paul, are barely sketched in, and you’re frankly relieved when the movie cuts to conventional scenes of the German vice-chancellor, Matthias Erzberger (Daniel Brühl), as he tries to broker a peace with the French generals who have trounced the German army. Negotiations are a one-sided affair. The French hold all the cards and want to surrender on their terms. Behind Erzberger, we record the unrelenting never-say die resentment of German officers. This will, of course, be carried forward into next war.
Stanley Kubrick, “Paths of Glory,” made what is still the greatest movie about trench warfare, and he wasn’t shy about involving us in actual drama. “All Quiet on the Western Front” lumbers along, so that even once the armistice is struck there’s still another combat episode, all to demonstrate, with overly highlighted tragic irony, that the body count in World War I kept escalating for no reason. That is what any rational person would believe. Yet “All Quiet on the Western Front”Is the war movie its thesis statement? It never stops making its point and leaves you feeling less empty than before.