Hello! You’re reading an entry in the Jscars 2022, a series on my favorite movies of the year 2022. Read the previous entries here:
“My son was killed in the war. He doesn’t feel any honor.”
World War I was a cruel and pointless war that could have easily been avoided or ended much earlier than it was. This is essentially common knowledge at this point, but I think it bears repeating as much as possible. Around 10 million men died in conflicts that usually at most advanced their territory by a few yards while living in miserable conditions. Most of them were around my own age.
Choosing to make a new adaptation of All Quiet on the Western Front now is a bold decision. The book itself is obviously a classic, and of its two adaptations one is also regarded as a classic of cinema and the other has a decently sized cult following. For this adaptation to work there had to be some new element to make it worth it. One obvious element is simply that due to being newer the brutality of the war and what the characters go through can be portrayed in an incredibly clear manner. And this is certainly true, as several times throughout the movie I found myself gasping or simply holding my breath at what was happening on screen in front of me, horrified at what I was watching. One scene involving tanks was particularly difficult to watch.
But I think where this adaptation truly shines is actually in one of its more controversial additions to the story. The novel itself and both previous adaptations have solely portrayed the life and actions of the men on the front line of the war, but this new adaptation opts to also include scenes of members of the government negotiating peace talks and discussing strategy for the war. While this can be seen as taking us away from the brutalities that the soldiers on the front line had to go through, I think it serves another message that this adaptation tries to communicate more than any other version of the story. That the higher ups and people in power prolonged this war far longer than there was any reason to, and that their incompetence and at times even cruelty is the direct cause for all the horrors of war that followed. All those men didn’t die because war is some neutral force that just happens to impact ten million people. They were led to death by a government and group of politicians who failed them.
Despite the movie being specifically about World War I, I found this aspect of it to be very modern. It’s practically impossible for a topic such as war to be non-political, so while watching the movie I thought about a lot of things going on in the world right now. I thought about what it would be like if I was alive during a time when I could have been drafted into a war or convinced by propaganda to join one willingly. I thought about how lucky I am not to be living somewhere such as Ukraine with everything that’s going on right now. I thought about the events occurring right now in East Palestine, Ohio and how officials have handled the situation. Every day millions or perhaps even billions of people around the globe find themselves in a war of some kind, whether literal or more metaphorical. And more often than not they’re placed in that scenario by someone with far more power than them. Someone without a care in the world for what they’re actually going through.