I'm sure everyone knows the required reading for elementary and middle school. The anti-war book On the Western Front Quiet describes the fate of those soldiers who are always fighting on the front lines, and their feeling of war is the worst. The book is the story of a soldier who immediately after high school joins the front line in World War I and during the fighting all his comrades die and when the fighting is over, the gears of war completely destroy him.
German cinema is tackling this famous book for the first time, and has released an anti-war film where death awaits the main characters at any moment on Netflix.
I won't compare it to the 40+ year old version, each has its pros and cons, so I'll only review the film from this year.
It's clear that the Germans put every Euro into the film, and thanks to Swiss director Edward Berger, who studied filmmaking in the US, they made a very successful film.
We'll start with the setup. As reported here on Kritiky.cz, the film was shot in the Czech Republic, and so many of the buildings feature Czech scenery from Prague and various castles and estates. Namely Vlašská 346 in Prague, Prague-Malá Strana, Thunovská... Pobořany, Postoloprty, Sychrov Castle and others. Czech historical monuments are among the right places where wartime films could be shot. In some places, everything that was built 100 years ago is still preserved.
We must not forget that this is a war film, so we must also remember the trenches where every inch was fought for. The trenches and the life of the soldiers on the front line is really portrayed well, and the fact that the German troops were a lot less well supplied than the French is also quite a point that is definitely worth filming.
The main characters of the film (also the book) experience their war story from the time they arrive at the front until they die. As each gradually dies in battle, the main characters become increasingly jaded until the last two remain, who show the senselessness of war through their deaths. But unfortunately, the writers have adapted the book to make the scene perhaps easier to film or even to understand. I'm not going to write about all that is different, but unfortunately I don't really agree with these changes from the book. It makes the movie sound different than it should.
And how is it actually filmed? It's really realistic. The makeup artists, the creators of the buildings, the vintage vehicles... they attend to every detail to make the film as realistic as possible. The war is bloody and death really awaits everywhere, and the inventions of WWI, like tanks, gas attacks, flamethrowers, are the worst elements a soldier can expect on the battlefield.
I don't know if the book is also dedicated to describing the peace agreement, but this element, which takes place on a train in the film, certainly doesn't belong in the book. The end of the war was signed at 11:00 a.m. on November 11, 1918. The film takes this time and this hour to mean that the generals still want to fight to the last soldier to prove to themselves that Germany is still great. Therefore, the film's ending in the last battle will show the futility of the war even more so that people will understand even better that the rank and file soldiers who run for their deaths are the responsibility of the command, who have their thoughts elsewhere than on the health and life of the soldiers.
With the main character, Paul Bäumer, we experience his entire wartime life. From enlistment to death. It's his story. Tragic and unhappy. The other important element in the film is about the peace treaty, which is deliberately written for the film to better explain the story of an ordinary soldier.
We meet only one famous actor, Daniel Brühl, in the whole film, who plays all the standard he has for a Hollywood actor. The rest of the cast is completely unknown to me. It's a good thing, because we get to have a good experience of wartime suffering with unknown actors we haven't yet tagged from other films.
I think German Netflix deserves credit for releasing a film like this. It may not have been perfect, but for the wartime suffering of World War I, it's a must-see.
Interesting
Watch the 1979 On the Western Front Quiet online.
Photo © Reiner Bajo
Original article November 1, 2022 – Kritiky.cz
