What more can war movies really teach us?

The latest version of All Quiet on the Western Front, a German language film directed by Edward Berger, first crept into my awareness when it got one of the Golden Globe nominations for the best foreign language film. I figured that like many films that receive such a nomination from either the Oscars or the Globes, its availability would be scant until sometime in the middle of the year after it was nominated, so I didn't really give it a further thought.

Then the praise for the movie became deafening when it received a leading 14 BAFTA nominations, tying the most ever received by a film not in English. The BAFTAs are not something I usually keep up with, but I caught this in a news brief on the radio and it obviously really registered. However, I still assumed the movie was not generally available to me, especially here in Australia, because I had not seen it anywhere or heard anyone talk about it.

Then yesterday I was listening to Flimspotting's live year-end wrap-up show, and Adam Kempenaar chose the film's opening scene as a candidate for his favorite opening of the year. In fact, I think he also selected it as his winner. And in the context of this, I learned that it was actually available on Netflix.

Sigh. One more two hour and 30 minute film to fit in before my Tuesday deadline.

I made quick work of it by actually getting to it that very afternoon, during what we call "quiet time" in my house. I set up the projector in the garage so as not to impede my younger son's quiet time, which is usually conducted in our living room. (My older son and my wife favor their own bedrooms for "quiet time.")

There's no doubt this is a really good movie. But as I was watching it, all I could think about was that I'd seen it all before.

"You've seen one, you've seen 'em all" is a dangerous sentiment specifically when it comes to the movies, where we all know that the only six main stories in existence are being told over and over again. It's rare you see something that isn't a lot like something you've seen before. (The other movie I watched yesterday, the anime film Inu-Oh, might be an exception.)

But specifically with war movies, it's starting to feel like I have, indeed, seen them all.

Maybe this sentiment feels doubly so with All Quiet on the Western Front, which now has its third prominent adaptation of the original novel by Erich Maria Remarque. The first was of course the 1930 best picture winner, which I rewatched and discussed in this post back in 2020, and the second was a 1979 TV movie. It hasn't quite been another 50 years but we're now getting our third. 

The real problem with a 2022 version of All Quiet on the Western Front is that they no longer make any war movies that make war look glamorous, as a contrast with what this movie is trying to do. Hollywood history is littered with movies that function more as propaganda and war boosterism than they function as a serious consideration of the consequences of war, but none recently. It would be morally derelict to make such a movie in the 21st century. 

Therefore, every war movie shows the terrible fear of the soldier. Every war movie has faces blown off and limbs flying this way and that. Every war movie tells us the thing we already know: that war is hell. 

What's more, the thing that once made All Quiet on the Western Front really distinctive, its irony, is also now a dime a dozen. And now I'll issue a SPOILER WARNING before continuing, in case you haven't seen any version of this story.

The thing that makes the ending of the novel so depressing is that the final deaths of the characters we've come to know occur after the armistice has already been announced, when everyone knows that it is simply a countdown to the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month. At least in the version I saw yesterday, one particularly proud German general orders a final assault across the battlefield toward the French soldiers in their trenches, determined to lose the war with a final victory. 

But the irony of the soldier who dies just before the war ends -- kind of like the detective who dies on his one last case before retirement -- has also been a feature of numerous war movies. All Quiet on the Western Front might have gotten there first, but others have flooded that space since.

So I don't feel like I myself can heap significant praise on Berger's version of this sort of movie, since it comes only three years after another version that does a lot of the same things, and also won a lot of praise at the time, probably finishing as the runner up for best picture at the Oscars. That's of course Sam Mendes' 1917.

Mendes' movie did offer us something that other war movies had not. It was made to appear as though it all occurred in one take, without any edits. Of course, there's an actual loss of time during the story when a character loses consciousness, and we all know that with a few exceptions (like another German film, Victoria), a movie can't really be done all in one take. But at least Mendes tried to make it seem like he had, just as Alejandro G. Inarritu had done with an actual best picture winner in Birdman. 

What Mendes did in 1917 might not have been teaching us anything we didn't know about war, which prominent World War II movies like Saving Private Ryan were also working overtime to teach us, but it did create a reason for its own existence through its audacious technique.

I'm struggling to find that reason with All Quiet on the Western Front. So that means even if it looks great and sounds great and everything like that (many of those BAFTA nominations were technical), it still is ultimately telling me things I would expect to see in every war movie that gets made from now until I die.

I'll finish on one example.

There's a scene midway through the film when the main character, Paul Baumer (Felix Kammerer), gets in a close combat fight with a French soldier, stabbing him repeatedly in the chest in a sunken part of the battlefield where they are not in the line of fire. Paul is then overcome by emotion. When he sees his enemy has not yet died, and apparently unwilling to go back to his knife, he tries jamming the man's mouth with mud. This just makes him cough, though. So he goes back and clears out the mud, opens the man's uniform to release some pressure, and wets a rag with water from a nearby puddle to drip it into the man's mouth, to quench his thirst in his final moments. When the man then dies, Paul is swept with a new wave of grief and regret.

As well as this scene is played, it feels like I could have telegraphed this sequence of events from the moment I saw Paul charge this other man. Is that because it happened in the 1930 filmed version of the novel, which I saw only three years ago, and therefore it's in the back of my mind? Or is it just the most efficient way possible to demonstrate the psychic toll on a young man who was in high school two months ago?

I spent all of All Quiet on the Western Front looking for a scene or sequence of events I could not telegraph, and that's the problem with most if not all war movies made today. It's always a valuable project, it seems, to remind us of the horrors of war. Any person in the audience could be considering these things for the first time. 

But for film veterans like me ... I need more, and I'm not sure the prospects of getting it any time in the future, without a radical refocus of how we make war movies.

There is one thing this version has going for it that it does not share with the previous versions, which is that this story about German soldiers is finally being told by a German filmmaker, in the German language. That is probably the best reason for its existence, especially since Berger obviously had the ability to deliver on it. 

Maybe it's things like this I'm going to have to hold on to if I want to feel something new and different from a war movie. But they aren't enough for me to call this one of the best movies of the year.

Steadily progressing through my library rentals

The Melbourne Public Library system is the most generous I have ever patronized. Whereas Los Angeles allowed you a maximum of three movies for a maximum of two days -- at least when I lived there seven years ago -- Melbourne is a comparative embarrassment of riches. You can total up to 50 items that can be taken out for three weeks at a time -- and then renewed, and then renewed one more time. Unless there's a reservation for one of them, in which case you have to return it at the end of your current rental period. A near perfect system.

And in the past, I've come close to those 50 items. With a combination of books, CDs and DVDs for myself and my kids, I've probably flown well past 30 items, maybe even up to 40. I've never been cut off, but that kind of makes me happy, because that sort of profligate behavior would seem to be taking advantage of the library's good will.

Unfortunately, when the libraries shut down back in March, I had nowhere near 50 books, movies and CDs out. In fact, I had ten. Four of which were books for my older son.

They're the same ten books and movies I still have out. Every time I check, their due date has been pushed forward, in recognition of the uncertainty of when the library will open again. The last time I checked before writing this post, they were not due back until May 17th. Comically, checking again just now, I see that that due date has been moved forward by exactly one day. However, we would all agree that at the moment, the due date doesn't mean much.

Now under ordinary circumstances, I pick up whatever movie catches my fancy, as I am unconcerned whether I watch it or not. That's both new-to-me movies and those I want to revisit. I like having the choices around. Under ordinary circumstances, I return more than half of them unwatched, not because I run out of time per se, but because I face the reality that the situation to watch them just never arose. As there was no cost to borrowing them, there's no consequence to not watching them.

All Quiet on the Western Front, which I believe is the first best picture winner I ever saw when I watched it during history class back in high school, would ordinarily have been one of those that got returned unwatched. But during the pandemic, it's been easy enough to decide I will, indeed, watch 100% of those I borrowed.

I just wish that number were higher than five.

The three I've watched previously are:

Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (for the second time)
Fahrenheit 451 (the new one directed by Ramin Bahrani, which was not good)
Careful, He Might Hear You (an Australian movie from the 1980s, which was also not good)

Which leaves only my second viewing of Life is Beautiful -- intended as a recontextualization of the movie in its recent comparisons to Jojo Rabbit. I have until May 18th, or in reality, probably a lot later.

My tenth item, if you are doing the math, is the graphic novel Watchmen, which I finished about a month ago.

Now, I think I did have more movies out prior to this, but returned some of them that I'd watched, and possibly some I had determined I would not watch. It's starting to feel like ancient history now so I can't really remember. But if I'd known the libraries were about to close their doors -- something I probably could have figured if everything hadn't been so strange at that time -- I would have gone in and started indiscriminately sweeping armloads of DVDs off the shelves.

So as not to squander all of your attention span, let's switch now to discussing All Quiet on the Western Front in particular.

Boredom. That was my memory of watching this film. I remember wondering when this movie would ever end, a reaction that was probably exacerbated by the fact that it likely took nearly a week's worth of high school history classes to watch it all. (It's only 128 minutes, but I doubt we would have watched more than 35 minutes per day.)

My impression of it was that it was some sort of square John Wayne war movie -- well before John Wayne of course, but lacking in grit and realism. I say this without ever actually having seen a John Wayne war movie. But the point is, I remember it being a long slog in which men exchanged thoughts while holed up in a bunker or in the trenches. The 15- or 16-year-old me would have been thinking "Give me some action! I want some action!"

Well, AQOTWF is not at all like I remembered. If it's boring -- and my attention did wander from time to time -- it's not because nothing happens. In fact, quite the contrary. This is a very mobile movie, frequently changing locales and scenarios, such that it becomes a succession of wartime set pieces, each of which is kind of doing something different. Those different things are all a variation on the same thing, which is the theme that there's nothing glamorous about war and that it is not, as the poet Wilfred Owen once wrote (and as quoted here in this movie), dulce et decorum est pro patria mori. ("It is sweet and honorable to die for one's country.")

In fact, the movie was so different from my memory of it that it makes me wonder if I actually sat through the whole thing, or whether I was absent for part of the week and just watched one disconnected 35-minute segment of it. Or maybe the movie was on but I was doodling and making paper airplanes in the back of the room.

One thing I had clearly not remembered was that the characters we follow in this movie are German. I would have bet my bottom dollar that they were American, or maybe British, and I can see why the younger me would have remembered that, given that all the German characters speak with the actors' native American accents. (Not Native American accents -- important distinction.) Films intended for American audiences preferred accessibility to realism at that time. The poster above plays no small role in deemphasizing their problematic German identities, as the helmet you see this soldier wearing is not the very easily identifiable World War I helmets worn by German soldiers, called Stahlhelm ("steel helmet"). The characters in the movie wear that helmet, but the character on this poster does not.

In fact, I wonder if All Quiet would have been one of the movies that prompted a move toward greater realism in depictions of characters from other countries. Although the movie was obviously highly acclaimed, I can't help but feel like it makes the characters seem far less German, and far more hokey, that they speak in American accents. You could argue that the point is to make audiences better identify with the characters -- you know, all soldiers are human beings and the like -- but my guess is that the concession to realism was largely commercially inspired.

I was surprised at how intense this movie actually gets. It makes use of a highly sophisticated grasp of editing, especially at that time, to give us chaotic war scenes and scenes of panic among the soldiers. One particular sequence involving rows of attacking soldiers getting mowed down by a machine gun stuck out to me for being simultaneously expressionistic and realistic, a profound combo. You also get a lot of people with amputated limbs, one soldier who is blinded by shrapnel or some other warfare byproduct, and others who go stir crazy inside the bunker. As a matter of fact, it's kind of the opposite of the John Wayne stoicism I attributed to this movie. It gets under your skin.

I still found it distended at times, and with a few exceptions, it wasn't all that easy to always know who was who, even though director Lewis Milestone et al make an effort to differentiate them in the classroom scene that starts the movie, when they are eating up the propaganda fed to them by a military recruiter/teacher. As a few of the characters die off, though, the cast gets winnowed down and the narrative moves toward an affecting finish.

So now I can really say, with absolute certainty, that I have seen all the best picture winners.

Stay tuned for a post about Life is Beautiful, probably next week.