The bar for terror and carnage onscreen has been raised far beyond that. 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 1930 Hollywood version of “All Quiet on the Western Front,” directed by Lewis Milestone, is widely regarded as an anti-war landmark.
By the end of the war, 17 million men had fallen between those cracks. 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 the new reality of long-distance slaughter made possible by technology.
So why did all those soldiers die? For no reason. Over the course of the war, the land “capture” on the Western Front was meager the location of the front line never moved by more than half a mile. He is soon sent to the Western Front, a place where millions of soldiers have already gone to their deaths in what is essentially a homicidal turf war where no turf exchanges hands. 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. 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. By contrast, the new German version of “ All Quiet on the Western Front” feels like an experience that’s been stripped to the bone - morally, spiritually, and dramatically.
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