All Quiet on the Western Front was a dreary pretentious overlong novel about the pointlessness of war. Once, people exclaimed on its brilliance to impress their intellectual superiors. Now? Maybe they’d be impressed if you shoved a hardcover up your own ass, but literacy is a relic of colonialism.
A dreary overlong film version was produced back in 1930, which critics duly lined up to praise, back when it was edgy to even hint at being anti-war.
90 years later and we are more educated than our primitive forebears, cynically aware of how much everything, especially war, sucks. So why remake AQWF (as it’s colloquially known) again?
Beat a dead horse much?
In German, “Besiege ein totes pferd” has a whole different meaning which roughly translates to: the childlike joy one experiences while masturbating. So they have no way of knowing how tired this anti-war theme is. Yes, this is a German film, bought by Netflix, to add some semblance of quality to their lineup. For no matter how bad AQWF2022 is, it outshines the common Netflix fare.
The jaded war movie veteran asserts approved Narrative: World War 1 consisted of soldiers huddled in trenches, waiting for a clueless general to order their advance to senseless destruction by machine gun fire.
He’s not entirely wrong, but in a more nuanced sense: the tactical playbook hadn’t been revised to account for machine guns. It took millions of deaths for this innovation to be understood. Hindsight makes it easy to blame this or that general, but like them, most of us stick with what we know. Assaults tend to fail due to lack of mass, so send more men. Rinse and repeat. This is - sort of - how Grant won the Civil War, just before the machine gun era kicked off.
But in WW1 as everything else, the Narrative must be rewritten and reinforced until it becomes historical fact. Stanley Kubrick’s brilliant Paths of Glory congealed the WW1 mold, just as Oliver Stone’s Platoon cemented a false narrative that US Troops in Vietnam smoked dope and fragged their officers - when not murdering civilians. And if renegade auteur Chris Nolan cracked the WW1 mold a bit with Dunkirk, well, AQWF2022 is here to offer a thematic retreat to safer, more familiar messaging.
Isn’t it deep, though, when the very point is pointlessness?
Maybe the first dozen times.
AQWF2022 makes awkward but determined effort to rub our faces in the nihilistic mud, with a whole lot of literal mud to drive its metaphor home. Such plot as exists follows a young soldier and his friends who enlist, I guess, because they are stupidly predisposed to cartoonish bombast about the fatherland. Their naivete quickly dissolves in the grim reality of the front, replaced by fleeting brotherhood as the boys are churned one by one through the meat grinder.
The montage is often beautiful, framing earnest young actors dwarfed by both the beauty and horror of their surroundings. The brotherhood feels real; and a clearly enormous budget is put to good cinematographic use. The various vignettes, loosely strung together, are often poignant in their own way, but lack coherence. Long, lingering shots of the various characters contorting their faces into a variety of traumatized expressions predominate. The actors are up to the job, but who cares?
Long as AQWF2022 is, and much as it wants to be another film about foolish generals sending innocents to die, it fails to establish any villainous leaders until too late. The young soldiers, then, do not attack because they are afraid of the penalties of disobedience, nor because they are patriots (already having been disillusioned), so what motive do they have?
The main character is a robot in battle, joining the charge because it’s the thing to do, I guess, engaging in something resembling heroics (in that he kills quite a few of the enemy and at close range), while staggering forward in a ketamine-dissociated trance. There’s not even a reckless friend to chase and try to keep alive - his friends vanish in battle. Nor is he reckless himself - just a marionette staring glumly at his own limbs as they pump him awkwardly toward the enemy, seemingly of their own accord.
The final scene of battle is a lame attempt to blockbusterize the film, throwing tanks and flamethrowers into a confusing mess that cannot actually intend to represent real warfare. I suppose there may have been a point on a WW1 battlefield where tanks were this unstoppable, but mostly they were experimental new technology and failed to accomplish much other than ripping down some barbed wire to clear the way for infantry. Part and parcel of this tank attack is stand-up fighting between flamethrowers and rifles. And the flamethrowers win!
The battle scenes are ill-conceived distraction from naval gazing into the abyss.
Another distraction, more slyly-conceived, is a lame attempt to rehabilitate Germany from the opprobrium of history by revising marginal figure Matthias Erzberger into a proto-woke hero of the Fatherland, who would have ended the damn war if the French would only let him.
The real-life Erzberger - a minor politician who expertly morphed from pro to anti-war as the writing on the wall became clear - was sent to deliver Germany’s final capitulation, in the vain hope the French might make concessions for a peacenik.
The AQWF2022 proto-woke Erzberger accosts French general Fochs with scathing arguments like “People are dying out there!” and wrings his hands over 6-of-1, half-dozen-of-the-other French and German bloodlust, through much of what one can discern of a third act.
I don’t need to know anything about Erzberger to know that in actual WW1 history, arguments like “People are dying out there!” would be met with - at best - contempt. When AQWF2022 Erzberger accosted the French general Fochs with this modernism, I wondered if, in reality, the Germans behind him would have murdered him for it, or if the French would have beaten them to it. Peace might have broken out just from the catharsis of eliminating the jackass who dares to utter such banalities.
Happier times, before the end of history. Better to die in a foxhole than have your soul sucked dry by shitty propaganda, but here we are.