All Quiet On The Western Front - review pt 2
Stab in the back?
This is a bad film.
And I’m not the only one.
I’m not going to quote a positive opinion I read because I think it was influenced by advance viewing but they have a right to it, still don’t agree with it and don’t have to publish it even for criticism. And I don’t mean you, Boney! :)
And here we go, pt 2.
SPOILERS
Convenient these 2 m wide wire fences randomly dumped on the terrain. You can put even a tank or two in between them. Sort of makes tanks superfluous though. The lines are basically touching and there aren’t many obstacles between them unless you’re using a walking frame and can only go in a straight line.
Oh god. What are the tanks shooting at. And how are the tanks shooting INTO the trenches.
Germans panicked by those tanks they’ve been seeing for two years now by this point actually.
No artillery to counter them? No AT rifles?
Also remember that this is a French COUNTER-ATTACK with tanks.
A very likely scenario.
In November.
8th November.
1918.
Okay the tanks have crossed the trenches except for one which somehow went into one trench which was wide enough for some reason. And the Germans are retreating now. Well at least some of the Germans did nasty things with grenades.
Explosions don’t work like that.
A mine or a shell.
He doesn’t even have a flesh wound. He should have been vaporised.
Anybody mention this two year veteran leaving his best pal behind without looking back?
And the perfidious French shoot a surrendering German.
This film sucks.
It’s already doing stab in the back and now the French are killing surrendered soldiers like they’re Waffen SS. Also I think they barbecued one prisoner to death though that’s not show exactly. He wasn’t armed.
This film constantly does the stupid trope of a shell exploding a meter behind a running soldier and nothing happens. That’s not how artillery works. It doesn’t have to hit you. The shrapnel and shockwave rips you apart at a very large distance. The protagonist already survived a direct hit though.
This is supposed to November 1918, the terrain would be fresh and it looks like Verdun/Mordor.
Stab in the back.
Netflix you have released Nazi apologia.
Versailles wasn’t that bad and its a long way down the line. This is Nazi mythology.
Frag off.
More like 10.000 a day.
It was the generals’ idea dear film makers .
Yeah, I don’t have strength for the shell hole scene because the other bloke was also directly hit by an explosion and didn’t disintegrate but fell over lightly into the hole.
Where is General von Baldie getting his food?
Also he would be worried about revolution and mutiny, not drinking champagne.
This is chateau general bollocks transplanted into a film about Germans.
This film takes all the tropes of BAD English films and makes them German. This not All Quiet On The Western Front, a masterpiece in German about the German experience.
Instead its a clone of bad English films.
Its the VHS via Cannon films version of Paths of Glory, a film I will soon watch again.
Give Gary a follow.
Like the newspaper shows, the Kaiser had abdicated. The generals weren’t eating pheasant and drinking wine, they had their pistols on the table eating turnip soups.
What’s the second part of the film actually supposed to be?
Paul was dead by November in the book.
Is this a crypto-soldaten film masquerading as an anti-war film? Why not do Sieben vor Verdun instead?
Some bloke with a leg wound gives Paul knickers or something. I don’t know which bloke this and I dont care.
Okay and then the wounded guy kills himself. ‘Because it’s over’.
Okay, then.
Don’t care.
The film hasn’t made me care.
I really don’t know who this is.
The sergeant or the one with the Polish name?
Doesn’t matter.
Then they do some soldier talking with each other stuff in the monastery.
People, this film should be over by now.
Not time for building characters.
100 minutes in.
I still don’t care about them.
Guy plays with cockroach.
Is that deep?
I think its supposed to be deep.
The blue cockroach.
I care more for the cockroach.
It has character and motivation.
Mate, you’re now ripping off Apocalypse Now’s color palette and shots.
Is this going to be some random forest nonsense again?
Over earnest cinematography award goes to…
I don’t know what the forest has to do with the next part but the DP thinks it cool.
It boring.
The French are the real baddies here.
Frag you Netflix.
Frag you for propagating the bad onerous peace myth.
Frag you for repeating Nazi lies.
Frag you.
Even Versailles 1919 was ‘fair’ when compared to say the terms of the Prusso-French war - also Versailles but in 1871.
The German historian Detlev Peukert wrote that Versailles was far from the impossible peace that most Germans claimed it was during the interwar period, and though not without flaws was actually quite reasonable to Germany.
Okay they sign the treaty.
The soldiers go to steal from starving farmers under brutal German military oppression rule again.
We supposed to cheer the soldiers?
What’s with the kid?
Ah, he’s angry at the thieves. He looks like he hasn’t been eating properly.
MORE FRAGGING PRETENTIOUSNESS FROM THE DP.
Okay, the other guy gets shot and dies in a blue forest after walking half a mile off to piss, like you do. There are lots of epic sad pathetic shots of the soldier pissing in the forest and looking around with deep soldierly thoughts.
BTW unauthorised looting was punishable by death. So that’s fair that the kid shoots him.
Paul goes for a walk. General Von Suicidal orders an attack.
The soldiers would have shot him on the spot. That was the atmosphere in the German army on 8 November. There was revolution taking place and the generals were terrified. Didn’t happen, wouldn’t happen.
Look the film is setting up this bullshit in order to have Paul die in a senseless attack because they had to frag the novel chronology in order to make a soldaten film masquerading as Lemarque. That’s why none of this makes sense and it all falls apart eventually.
One bloke objects and get shot.
No way.
The firing squad would be executed instead.
This is nonsense.
All of this strange bullshit was strung together in order to completely change the book into a film about French bad, soldiers good, Versailles bad.
Atrocious.
Not going to screenshot dead Paul sitting with panties in his hands because its some Japanese knicker fetish and demeaning to soldiers.
Kurosawa wept.
This fragging forest again.
You are liars.
Not only selling bad history but also selling Stab In The Back.
And I’m not the only one who calls this end text nonsense:
Well frag you.
If you like this content, buy the team of Blood, Skipper and Du Cane a coffee. Its only a buck, or whatever you like. Doesn’t repeat unless you want it to.
Nazism’s connection with the German soldaten trench life and nostaliga is covered here by Philip Blood in his book, Bandenbekämpfung - Hitler’s Bandit Hunters and the SS In Nazi Occupied Europe.
If you want an author’s $2 EBook PDF copy of Bandenbekämpfung - Hitler’s Bandit Hunters and the SS In Nazi Occupied Europe, use the link.
Special signed EBooks with a dedication are available here.
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