ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT
D: Edward Berger (2022) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
Felix Kammerer, Albrecht Schuch, Daniel Brühl,
Sebastian Hülk, Aaron Hilmer, Edin Hasanovic
This is like the German equivalent of "1917", following a grunt soldier though the gas, mud, squalor and gore of the First World War. Like the American Civil War, World War One was a conflict in which traditional battlefield tactics were no match for advanced weaponry, men still attacking on foot over open ground in the face of artillery, machine guns, tanks and planes: a pointless exercise in wholesale slaughter. The camera doesn't turn away from any of that, even when you maybe wish it would. The musical score is jarring, and when the actors play dead, in shots that seem to go on for eons, they really look dead. The dead are the lucky ones. Based on the novel by Erich Maria Remarque.
