There is so much about this film that it can be difficult to actually know where to start. Well, okay, I could mention that it is based on a book that has been touted as being the 'greatest war story ever told', though that pretty much goes without saying. This is one of those books that seems to find its way into pretty much every high school reading curriculum, and if my schools were anything to go by, the movie is trotted out as well, though of course much of what is in the book is lost in the film.
Mind you, it isn't as if they didn't try, namely because there is a lot of exposition going on, which is done in the form of Paul Bremmer's thoughts. However, the whole point of the book is to not only help us understand the horrors of industrialised warfare, but also that the people that we happen to be fighting are no different from us.
This probably why it is just a great book, because all of the characters are German, and we are seeing the story from the other side, or at least from the otherside where I am concerned. We are all brought up being told that Germany was the bad guy in World War I, but the reality is that not only were we being brainwashed, but they were too. You could say that it is the end result on unbridled nationalism, though of course that was to actually come later.
In a way what we are seeing in this film is the classic definition of insanity, and that is doing the same thing over and over again with the hope that we will get a different result. On the Western Front, we spent the good part of five years simply bombing the otherside with artillery and then sending the troops over the top to pretty much get mowed down by machine guns. Why nobody actually realised that relentless shelling pretty much told the otherside that an attack was coming is beyond me.
It also shows how industrialised warfare simply turns human beings into figures. In fact, once you become a number, a statistic, you simply cease to have any character or life. This is probably why some newspapers in the United States are actually putting some faces to the people who have died of the rona. It is probably why here in Australia, whenever somebody died, more details were given about the death than just the daily numbers. That is the thing, there is just something dehumanising about statistics, and when we are just numbers, then it starts to feel as if a death is meaningless.
I guess that is why the ending is so confronting because we spend the entire movie getting to know Paul, only to have his death at the end seems to be, well, inconsequential to the powers that be. It was all quiet on the Western Front, yet we got to know Paul, a boy who spent the formative years of his life in the trenches, a boy that had hopes and dreams, and a desire to become an artist, only to have that taken away from him.
It is also interesting to see him at home on leave. It seems that back home nobody truly understood the horrors of the war, yet ironically he decided to return. I guess by that time there was nothing else that defined him, other than simply sitting in the trenches doing the same thing over and over again. Yet, nobody seemed to realise what it was like, people in Germany where simply going about their daily lives.
As I mentioned, there is so much more, such as the three French girls in the farm, or the French soldier in the crater. What the movie attempts to do is to put a human face onto both sides, and to help us realise that what we are being told by the powers that be isn't actually the truth. Look, it is a pretty good film, and a confronting one at that, but in the end it certainly doesn't beat the book.
Mind you, it isn't as if they didn't try, namely because there is a lot of exposition going on, which is done in the form of Paul Bremmer's thoughts. However, the whole point of the book is to not only help us understand the horrors of industrialised warfare, but also that the people that we happen to be fighting are no different from us.
This probably why it is just a great book, because all of the characters are German, and we are seeing the story from the other side, or at least from the otherside where I am concerned. We are all brought up being told that Germany was the bad guy in World War I, but the reality is that not only were we being brainwashed, but they were too. You could say that it is the end result on unbridled nationalism, though of course that was to actually come later.
In a way what we are seeing in this film is the classic definition of insanity, and that is doing the same thing over and over again with the hope that we will get a different result. On the Western Front, we spent the good part of five years simply bombing the otherside with artillery and then sending the troops over the top to pretty much get mowed down by machine guns. Why nobody actually realised that relentless shelling pretty much told the otherside that an attack was coming is beyond me.
It also shows how industrialised warfare simply turns human beings into figures. In fact, once you become a number, a statistic, you simply cease to have any character or life. This is probably why some newspapers in the United States are actually putting some faces to the people who have died of the rona. It is probably why here in Australia, whenever somebody died, more details were given about the death than just the daily numbers. That is the thing, there is just something dehumanising about statistics, and when we are just numbers, then it starts to feel as if a death is meaningless.
I guess that is why the ending is so confronting because we spend the entire movie getting to know Paul, only to have his death at the end seems to be, well, inconsequential to the powers that be. It was all quiet on the Western Front, yet we got to know Paul, a boy who spent the formative years of his life in the trenches, a boy that had hopes and dreams, and a desire to become an artist, only to have that taken away from him.
It is also interesting to see him at home on leave. It seems that back home nobody truly understood the horrors of the war, yet ironically he decided to return. I guess by that time there was nothing else that defined him, other than simply sitting in the trenches doing the same thing over and over again. Yet, nobody seemed to realise what it was like, people in Germany where simply going about their daily lives.
As I mentioned, there is so much more, such as the three French girls in the farm, or the French soldier in the crater. What the movie attempts to do is to put a human face onto both sides, and to help us realise that what we are being told by the powers that be isn't actually the truth. Look, it is a pretty good film, and a confronting one at that, but in the end it certainly doesn't beat the book.