All Quiet on the Western Front FULL Reaction
Added 2023-06-06 13:15:22 +0000 UTCEasily one of the most intense and moving films I've seen in the past year...
Comments
PS: it just occurred to me that Peter Pan says "To die will be an awfully big adventure." How ironic.
Claudi H
2023-06-06 17:17:45 +0000 UTCThank you for reacting to this! The movies are actually based on a novel by Erich Maria Remarque, who was a WWI veteran and fought on the western front. He turned 19 briefly after joining the war. He was heavily wounded a few weeks into his service and while in the infirmary recorded his own experiences and those of his comrades and turned them into a novel. The book was very controversial back in the day. It was removed from school libraries in 1931 and it was one of the first "degenerate" books that the Nazis burned in 1933. The premier of the US movie in Berlin had to be stopped due to nazi goon squads disturbing the screening ordered by Goebbels himself. After Hitler became Chancellor of the Reich, the movie was banned for good, so were Remarque's books. Remarque's German citizenship was revoked in 1938 and he emigrated to the US where he became a citizen in 1947. (He lived in Switzerland between 1932 and 1939 and after 1948.) The novel is part of the curriculum in many German schools. While it is often praised as anti-war, Remarque called it unpolitical. He writes in the prologue: "This book is to be neither an accusation nor a confession, and least of all an adventure, for death is not an adventure to those who stand face to face with it. It will simply try to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped its shells, were destroyed by the war" I highly recommend Wolfgang Petersen's "Das Boot" (the director's cut!) for another war movie from German perspective (WWII). Also, Soviet "Come and See", which deals with the Nazi occupation and atrocities committed in Belarus. Very impactful movie. For US/Vietnam movies I recommend Kubrick's "Full Metal Jacket", Stone's "Platoon", and Cimino's "The Deer Hunter" with DeNiro and Walken.
Claudi H
2023-06-06 17:13:29 +0000 UTC
