All Quite On The Western Front (Edward Berger, 2022)

 

It was in the intro of the video game Fallout 2, where the unforgettable song "A Kiss To Build A Dream On" by Louis Armstrong is playing, that you here the narrator say "...war, war never changes." I think that this is the main sub-theme of this movie. Some might say that we have heard that story a million times and what do we need another anti-war movie for. I'm not sure that we need another anti-war movie, but I'm positive that this movie over here has an extremely clear reason for existing. I have seen a lot of war and anti-war movies because I dig the genre and the comments of those movies. I don't how many other movies have gone so deep into the core of war's devastation as this movie over here went. I can say with certainty that this movie is one of the heaviest things that I have seen in the recent years. I was clearly and utterly damaged by the movie and it took me some days to relieve myself from the painful memories and images that the movie gave me. I don't know how "modern" is a movie about World War I, but I can assure you that it was a piercing in the heart procedure to watch that movie till the end.

You see Germans don't fool around when they are making movies filled with comments and some deeper meaning. When Germans want to tell you something, they will say it in the most gritty and utterly disturbing way possible. You can remember examples like Downfall, Das Experiment and Combat Girls. All those movies have a tendency to give to the audience the sad, devastating truth. But in a way that Americans would never dream of. American movies tend to be gentler when they want to hit you in the face with something. German movies are the exact opposite. When you think that you had enough is when they hit you harder than ever. And this grittiness is what makes finally this movie such a great anti-war epic film. You see those Germans in the movie go from feasting arrogance about the war, to utter and destructive despair and panic. That I think is the core of the thing that it wanted the film to communicate with the audience. The stupidity of the pride and the harshness and ugliness of the true war.