Youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth ...

Rating: 10/10 (3 April 2012)

"All Quiet on the Western Front" is Lewis Milestone's epic adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's best-selling novel, the name of the author might sound unfamiliar so let's only say that he was a German World War I veteran.
The film was made 12 years after the end of the most barbaric and devastating massacres that prefaced Contemporary History with bloody letters and won the Academy Award for Best Picture and Best Directing. I could use so many superlatives to describe it but watching Milestone's war/epic left me cold with all the self- glorification and enthusiasm that only serves as a desire to hide the awareness of our own mediocrity. I will only say that "All Quiet on the Western Front" is a masterpiece because it's the first movie to make a political statement, and a courageous one, not pacifist but humanistic. If only for that, Milestone's film is a milestone on the field of cinematic intelligence.
"This story is 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 try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war."
If not an accusation, it does admit that a generation was destroyed. If not a confession, the film demonstrates that it takes war to realize life's value just as it takes jail to value freedom. And if not an adventure, it still conveys the strange exhilarating feeling of an escape from the world's lies and politicians' vanity, to reach a point where people can become fully themselves, as said Louis-Ferdinand Celine, a French WWI veteran and author: "Our youth has gone to the ends of the earth to die in the silence of the truth" in 'Journey to the End of the Night'.
More than an accusation, confession or adventure, the story is a tribute to a lost generation, the year of the release is even more significant because those who survived the War were not only alive, but young enough to have kept intact memories. "All Quiet on the Western Front" is a tribute to a youth sacrificed by greed, profit and patriotic glory in the altar of trenches, where every mile cost thousands of bodies. The film starts with boys whose eyes harangued by the patriotic speech of their school professor, burn with the intensely proud flame to fight in the name of Germany and desire of victory... and eventually to leave school. The first bombing will shatter all these beliefs, as they'll understand that whether you fight for French Motherland of German Fatherland, Mother Earth is the ultimate destination.
Most of the actors were not professional except for the extraordinary performance of Louis Wolheim as Kat, a mentor for the boys and for us. The actors were as inexperienced and youthful, as the boys who were listed and criticizing the acting on that level is like stamping on an ant when you can admire its strength: the cast embodies the tragedy of a War that dug a big hole in a whole generation. The last shot of the boys walking and turning their faces at us, juxtaposed with the sight of a mortuary, is like a warning for the years to come. But history taught us war is indeed a fever that just strikes everybody, nobody wants it until it happens and everybody wants it until they make it.
It's only at war that the soldiers can question its meaning, its origin, and only at war that the ranks, medals and protocols make no difference whatsoever. The most zealous drill sergeant starts sobbing at the first shell wheezing, highlighting one of war's few consolations: to reveal the true value of people in life and make everyone equal in death. In a powerful scene, Paul, the central character stabs for the first time a French soldier, and as he spends some time hidden with the body, he talks to him and realizes that they're both comrades, brothers, victims of the same political vanity and full of the same desire to live. All that separates them is a uniform, and to Death, even uniforms don't make a damn difference. The merit of "All Quiet on the Western Front" is to be told from German perspective, from the enemy, the other, and what better lesson for empathy than inviting an audience to comprehend that the other side, like in "Das Boot" for WWII, shared the same trauma?
And Milestone's film renders the most horrific aspects of war without any other special effects than an extraordinary editing and directing. 68 years before "Saving Private Ryan"'s iconic opening, Milestone showed soldiers hit by a volley of machine-gun fire, falling but with such a fast-paced directing that we never see them hitting the ground. Some shot show shadowy soldiers jumping from below as to suggest a human submersion, the atrocities and pointlessness of War never seemed so raw and real as in "All Quiet on the Western Front", because it showed what a slaughter World War I was, whether Spielberg's point was only to show that the second one was a good war.
When the few survivors came back to their hometown, they realize that the attitude and the enthusiasm toward the war were unchanged. Civilians and military, Family, the teacher, the boys in the classroom didn't learn anything. "And our bodies are earth, and our thoughts are clay, and we sleep and eat with death!" says Paul but he only receives insults and incomprehension. But he knows, and we know from his experience that he's the one who owns the truth, because in his mind are all his friends dead in the trenches, in the battlefield, in a lousy hospital.
But the tragedy of life is that as usual, it's not the dead but the living that need to be awakened.