All Quiet on the Western Front took home nine nominations for this year\u2019s Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best international Feature (as Germany\u2019s submission). It is, as you might know, adapted from Erich Maria Remarque\u2019s 1929 novel of World War I. It\u2019s big, and epic, and certainly lets you know where everyone involves stands on the subject of war. (They think it\u2019s bad.) It\u2019s also a film that doesn\u2019t have any good reason to exist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Paul B\u00e4umer (Felix Kammerer) is our protagonist, an idealistic and nationalistic 17-year-old in Germany who signs up to fight for the fatherland in 1917, more than halfway through World War I. He and his schoolmates are quickly disabused of any notions of war as heroic or noble, as they\u2019re thrown right into trench warfare and find one of their number dead before they can fire their first shot. We follow them through the next eighteen or so months, till the Armistice, as one by one they\u2019re killed in battle, often in circumstances that might be ridiculous if they weren\u2019t so tragic. Along the way, we see them hungry, disillusioned, bored, and filthy, along with occasional reminders of the use of chemical weapons that marked World War I for particular brutality. The film cuts away to scenes of negotiations between German and French leaders or discussions among German brass, all of which take place in relative luxury \u2013 and clean, dry conditions \u2013 compared to the sodden trenches in which Paul and his mates fight and die.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I had to read Remarque\u2019s novel in high school and hated it, yet somehow, despite looking incredible, this film doesn\u2019t do the book justice. There\u2019s a key passage in the book where Paul goes home to visit family from the front and finds that he\u2019s already changed enough that he can\u2019t relate to his relatives and friends any more. They don\u2019t understand what he\u2019s been through, and he\u2019s not the same person they knew before he went to fight. The film omits it entirely, in favor of those stolid scenes of generals and diplomats. The latter provides that strong contrast \u2013 there\u2019s a scene where one of the men is upset because the croissants were clearly not<\/em> baked that same morning \u2013 but it also wrecks any momentum the war story has, and it doesn\u2019t help the character development in the way that the book\u2019s scene where Paul goes home would have, something he doesn\u2019t really get until a bit much later in the film when he\u2019s trapped in no man\u2019s land with a French soldier.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The movie does look fantastic, though, even when it\u2019s gruesome. There are tremendous aerial shots of the battlefields, tight shots of the men in battle that put you uncomfortably close to the action, and trenches that I assume they just reused from 1917<\/a><\/em>. One of the Oscar nominations came for Makeup and Hairstyling, and you can see why; these men look disgusting. There\u2019s a clear commitment here to verisimilitude, and while I can\u2019t say this is what World War I really looked like, it\u2019s definitely what I think World War I really looked like.<\/p>\n\n\n\n All Quiet on the Western Front <\/em>is about two and a half hours long, and not brisk, which gave me a lot of time to think about the bigger picture (pun intended), and I couldn\u2019t escape the conclusion that this film doesn\u2019t need to exist. We don\u2019t really need an anti-war movie, not of this sort, at least, when war hasn\u2019t looked like this in a hundred years, and so much fighting today is done via drones that separate killer from victim. We don\u2019t need another World War I movie, especially since we just had one four years ago, and that war doesn\u2019t have the more enduring lessons to impart that World War II or Vietnam or Iraq (the second one) do. And this movie has nothing new to say about war or the book, which has been filmed at least twice before, including the 1930 American version that won Best Picture. New takes on existing films should bring something new, and this one can only offer better cinematography and makeup.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I can\u2019t believe this film got nine nominations while Decision to Leave<\/a><\/em>, South Korea\u2019s submission for the Best International Feature Film award, was shut out. There\u2019s no comparison here \u2013 Decision<\/em> is an original story, a better story, better acted, and with more to say. Argentina, 1985<\/a> <\/em>is better. La Caja<\/a><\/em>, which didn\u2019t even make the shortlist, is better. All Quiet<\/em> is more technically ambitious, but it\u2019s nowhere near as compelling as those films, and I don\u2019t think the point of the Best International Feature award, where countries from all over the world should be competing on equal footing, is to reward the film with the biggest budget. This is a big movie, and a fine one, but it is absolutely not a great one.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" All Quiet on the Western Front took home nine nominations for this year\u2019s Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best international Feature (as Germany\u2019s submission). It is, as you might know, adapted from Erich Maria Remarque\u2019s 1929 novel of World War I. It\u2019s big, and epic, and certainly lets you know where […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1290,1327,1325,1326,1324,936,215],"class_list":["post-9755","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2022-movies","tag-2023-best-adapted-screenplay-nominees","tag-2023-best-cinematography-nominees","tag-2023-best-international-feature-nominees","tag-2023-best-picture-nominees","tag-german-films","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9755","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9755"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9755\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10311,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9755\/revisions\/10311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9755"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9755"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9755"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}